JACOBS THEATRE, 242 West 45th Street

Crossing the Line

Two-time Olivier Award winner Brian Cox (The Bourne Identity), Jim Gaffigan (Salvation Boulevard), Golden Globe nominee Chris Noth (The Good Wife, Sex and the City), Jason Patric (Cat On A Hot Tin Roof) and Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner Kiefer Sutherland (24) star in this revival of Jason Miller’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play which returns to Broadway for a strictly limited engagement. Directed by two-time Tony Award winner Gregory Mosher

(A View From The Bridge), That Championship Season is a drama about the promise of youth … and the challenge of staying in the game. For over two decades, four players and the coach of a high school championship basketball team have gathered every year to re-live their greatest moment of glory. While three of the players have found small-town success, the fourth has never found his way. At this year’s reunion, tensions boil over, and as the celebratory evening turns brutal, long-held secrets bubble to the surface and life-long bonds are shattered.

“A dream cast… Chris Noth is a natural.” New York Magazine

“revived under the crisp direction of Gregory Mosher…plays as powerfully today as it did in 1972.”

The New Yorker

“Excellent, absorbing and searing.” Associated Press

“Keifer Sutherland is masterful.” Entertainment Weekly

CANAL PARK

West end of Canal Street next to the West Side Highway. Canal Park is one of the oldest city squares in Manhattan, with the city’s title to the land granted in 1686.

Photo of Canal Park in 1920 before it was taken over to build the Holland Tunnel.

Trees grow on Canal: Park to reopen 85 years later

Downtown Express

By Josh Rogers

Maybe good things do come to those who wait — if you have 85 years or so.

The final tease from Canal Park emerged last week as residents, workers and even motorists stuck in traffic at the west end of Canal St. got a better look at what the rebuilt and almost forgotten space will look like when it opens within a few weeks.

The triangular park was closed “temporarily” in 1920 to construct the Holland Tunnel. What was supposed to be a four-year operation by the New York and New Jersey Bridge and Tunnel commissions (precursor to the Port Authority) almost became permanent in 1930 when “Power Broker” Robert Moses, ironically a former parks commissioner, decided to keep the park closed in the hopes of building an elevated Canal St. highway leading to the Manhattan Bridge, said Richard Barrett, one of the leaders of the Canal West Coalition.

GERALD SCHOENFELD THEATRE – 236 W. 45th

Where do you draw the line?

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT, by Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, makes its world premiere on Broadway starring Bobby Cannavale, Chris Rock, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Annabella Sciorra and Yul Vázquez.

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT is a new high-octane, verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery from playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Jackie and Veronica have been in love since the 8th grade. But now, Jackie is on parole and living clean and sober under the guidance of his sponsor, Ralph D, while still living with and loving his volatile soul mate Veronica who is fiercely loving, but far from sober. Still, their love is pure. And true. Nothing can come between them – except a hat.

The Most Nominated New Play of the Season!
EXTENDED THROUGH JULY 17th!

“VIBRANT, HILARIOUS, MARVELOUSLY INTENSE, AND BLAZINGLY GOOD.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“MAKES THE AUDIENCE ROAR WITH RECOGNITION – Michael Musto, Village Voice

“MOVING AND POWERFUL, DELIGHTFUL AND TENDER.” – Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

“CHRIS ROCK DELIVERS! HIGHLY ENTERTAINING. ROCK HAS FLAWLESS TIMING.” – Scott Brown, New York Magazine

“A JOY TO BEHOLD. ONE OF THE BEST PLAYS IN AGES.” Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT is a new high-octane, verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery from playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Jackie and Veronica have been in love since the 8th grade. But now, Jackie is on parole and living clean and sober under the guidance of his sponsor, Ralph D, while still living with and loving his volatile soul mate Veronica who is fiercely loving, but far from sober. Still, their love is pure. And true. Nothing can come between them – except a hat

New York Times Review:

THEATER REVIEW

‘THE ___________ WITH THE HAT’

A Love Not at a Loss for Words

The play that dare not speak its name turns out to have a lot to say.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s vibrant and surprisingly serious new comedy opened on Monday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater under a title that cannot be printed in most daily newspapers or mentioned on network television.

This is vexing for those of us who would like to extol the virtues of “The ___________ With the Hat,” at least in public. (The title also seems to have created problems for the people trying to publicize the play.) This is by far the most accomplished and affecting work from the gifted Mr. Guirgis, a prolific and erratic chronicler of marginal lives (“Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” “Our Lady of 121st Street”). But I’ll admit that upon first hearing the name of his play, I thought irritably, “How the ___ am I going to write about it?” As you see, I have already devoted much space-consuming ink to my quandary.

The New Yorker Review:

THE THEATRE

War Games

Battles at home and abroad.

by Hilton Als

Spend some time on the upper Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the forty-six-year-old Stephen Adly Guirgis grew up, the son of an Irish mother and an Egyptian father, and you can still hear the notes in the scale of his theatrical repertoire: black, Jewish, and Latino voices that meet and crash and land on the predatory streets that his characters sometimes stalk far into the night, in search of a little coke, perhaps, or some Chicken McNuggets. Although Guirgis’s scripts are short on detail when it comes to the spaces his characters inhabit, you can picture them from the way the characters talk and express—or don’t express—their aspirations. Guirgis, a brilliant comedic talent—who began his stage career at the LAByrinth Theatre Company, where Philip Seymour Hoffman, a co-founder, directed his early work with great compassion—also has an original and knowing take on class, particularly as it plays out among the bottom-of-the-barrel working-class poor, who are virtually invisible to the wealthier men and women around them. Guirgis’s characters are strivers who lack the language to “pass” in a white-collar world; they’re frustrated by limitations that they’re only half aware of, and that frustration provides much of the painful hilarity in their dialogue, which piles miscommunication on top of misunderstanding.

In Guirgis’s seventh full-length play, “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” (at the Gerald Schoenfeld), audience members are treated to the author’s customary craftsmanship and themes, but his characters’ interior lives feel a little more considered than they have in the past. This is not to say that Guirgis’s first foray on Broadway is any less hysterical and irreverent than his previous works, which include “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” an outstanding 2000 piece about imprisonment and moral responsibility, and the 2003 comic epic “Our Lady of 121st Street,” which shows how the past can overwhelm and distort the present. After the inventive and poignant “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” which follows the life and career of history’s most famous fallen angel, premièred at the Public, in 2005, one could only wonder where Guirgis would go next. But “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” builds on the strength of those plays and then surpasses them. From the beginning of this elegiac, exhilarating, hundred-minute, intermissionless work, which is surely handled by the director Anna D. Shapiro, you can’t help noticing that Guirgis has shaken his habit of setting up ideas and situations for his characters to fit into; instead, full-blooded people take over and tell the story for him.

Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Jackie (Bobby Cannavale) are in their late twenties. They live in a Times Square S.R.O., but it’s their love that hems them in. Jackie, out on parole, is newly sober. As the play opens, Veronica is doing lines of coke while cleaning the apartment and talking to her mother on the phone. She feels that her mother is too strung out, and that she’s wasting time with the wrong man, and she’d like to get her into rehab. Vibrating with coke nerves, Veronica says, “Ma? O.K., look, for the last time, my opinion, you’re still a good-lookin’ woman with a huge, lovin’ heart and you’re not hard to please—clearly—but you’re dating a fuckin’ big-time loser with a head like a actual fuckin’ fish! . . . O.K., like, please, alls I’m gonna say, Ma, when you see him tonight: Take a moment. Take a breath. Take a real good look and just ax yourself in all honesty, ‘Do I wanna fuck him or fry him up with a little adobo and paprika?’ ” Jackie enters. He’s high on his new job at FedEx and on his love for Veronica, which hasn’t abated since they first met, as teen-agers. He looks as if he’d just stepped out of an eighties porno flick: slicked-back hair, a six-pack, skinny, muscular legs. (When he undresses, we see that he’s wearing a pair of white tube socks.) Jackie wants to make love, but Veronica has something on her mind. She’s been seeing someone else, but won’t say whom. Is it their downstairs neighbor, the motherfucker with the hat? No, it turns out that Veronica has been with Jackie’s A.A. sponsor, the homily-spewing, vegetable-juice-drinking Ralph D. (Chris Rock, in his Broadway début). Meanwhile, Ralph’s bitter, disaffected wife, Victoria (Annabella Sciorra), has the hots for Jackie—though you get the sense that she’d be into any man who paid her some attention. As Jackie’s world unravels, he calls on his wise, sardonic cousin, Julio (the phenomenal Yul Vázquez), who has Jackie’s back but not unconditionally: he tells Jackie exactly how self-obsessed he’s been.

Jackie and Veronica, as played by the astonishing Cannavale and Rodriguez, are two hopeful losers who want to win the kind of intimacy they’ve seen in movies, but for whom it’s always just out of reach. Even if life were to hand the savvy and deluded Veronica a chance at happiness, she wouldn’t be able to grab the brass ring. She and Jackie both desperately need and avoid each other. The interplay of their desire and their deceit makes them one of the most beautifully drawn couples to appear on the stage in years. As the play goes on, we watch the very notion of rehabilitation unravel, too. Guirgis isn’t anti-A.A. or anti-N.A., but he doesn’t shy away from the reality that exists offstage, as it were, in a world that isn’t protected by anonymity and trust. He knows enough about life to ask the right questions: What is recovery? And who, if anyone, can recover from the brutal high of a love hangover?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2011/04/25/110425crth_theatre_als#ixzz1NItsypRV

Exploration of space:

“Walking the Line” by Callie Richards

Line Art

TYPOGRAPHY

Font, Leading, Line-height

by Atlas Wegman

Straight line?

Crooked line?

Falling in line?

A line is a straight one-dimensional figure having no thickness and extending infinitely in both directions…

____     ____ _ ___ _____ _ _ _ _____ ____________ _________________ _ _ _ _ _ _

Street Lines by Thomas Marin

Lines on the Floor by Thomas Marin

Reflections on Line by Thomas Marin

Lines on the Wall by Jacey Mossack

Are We Connected? by Eli Kernis

Police Line–Do Not Cross by Eli Kernis

What is a line?

Where do you see Line?

THEATER REVIEW | ‘THE COMEDY OF ERRORS’

NEW YORK TIMES

By Ben Brantley

David Newman, left, and Robert Hands in “The Comedy of Errors.”

Propeller, the all-male British theater troupe that routinely turnsShakespeare into a donnybrook, has never hesitated to hit below the belt. Or above it, or behind it, or right in the buckle. But it has surely never landed as many blows as it does in its relentlessly punch-drunk production of “The Comedy of Errors,” which runs through March 27 at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Edward Hall’s eye-popping staging of this early Shakespeare comedy works its way through a wide vocabulary of martial arts moves — boxing jabs, swift kicks to the rear, karate chops, wrestling locks — and weapons that include nightsticks,nunchaku sticks, whips, dinner plates and cans of mace. Yet despite such variety, an air of sameness soon pervades the ancient town of Ephesus, as if one were watching an endless loop of a particularly frenzied episode of “The Itchy and Scratchy Show” from “The Simpsons.” With a lively mariachi band setting the rhythms for this production, it’s not only the beat that goes on and on; the beatings do too.

In the past Propeller has used its no-holds-barred approach to surprisingly unsettling and illuminating effect. Their twinned interpretations of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Twelfth Night” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy in 2007) brought out a cruelty in those works that most directors choose to finesse and that made us think twice about what we reflexively laugh at.

But if ever a play didn’t cry out for this company’s brand of man-handling, it’s “The Comedy of Errors.” Scaling up the brutality in what is Shakespeare’s most purely farcical work is like putting Charlie Sheen on a heavy diet of steroids. There’s more than enough testosterone to begin with. And since a Keystone Kops style of mayhem has been the default setting for “Errors” for many decades, the more startling approach would have been to turn down the violence and look for the poetry. The slapstick can almost automatically take care of itself.

As it is, this tale of the chaos and confusion inspired by the convergence of two long-separated sets of identical twins has been given inspired touches of theatrical ingenuity, though they are often overwhelmed by the nonstop punching and shouting. Mr. Hall and the designer Michael Pavelka have reconceived Ephesus as a sort of Tijuana-type border town, a place where guys go to get drunk, get lucky and get lost.

When Antipholus of Syracuse (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) arrives here in search of his long-lost brother, accompanied by his servant, Dromio (Richard Frame), he finds that festive, presumably potent drinks keep materializing out of nowhere. So does a tribe of musicians wearing sombreros, who provide a stream of mood-reflecting melody. These strolling troubadours create the senses-blurring element through which all the characters swim, and they’re the best thing in the show.

Traditionally the biggest problem in staging “Errors” is its demand for two pairs of actors who can pass for mirror images of each other. Mr. Hall’s production solves this quite nicely. He introduces the four twins in the play’s opening scene by having them materialize as a kind of illuminated Exhibit A, when the travel-weary Aegeon (John Dougall), tells the story of how he lost his sons.

Mr. Bruce-Lockhart and Mr. Frame, as the visiting Antipholus and Dromio, and Sam Swainsbury and Jon Trenchard as the home-town Ephesian characters of the same names, have been attired and coiffed to such distinctively lurid effect that you don’t really look beyond the surface. Each set of twins is dressed identically (as this improbable story demands), and that first superficial double image sticks with you.

Antipholus of Syracuse is a brooding bachelor, given to reflections on identity; Antipholus of Ephesus is a hedonistic married man, given to buying bling and consorting with prostitutes. But they share a tendency to beat up their manservants when they feel they are being disrespected or misinformed. Both Dromios complain often of being treated as whip-scarred beasts of burden.

n this version, though, it isn’t only the Dromios who come in for hard treatment. Physical abuse appears to be the lingua franca of Ephesus. Antipholus of Ephesus’s jealous wife, Adriana (Robert Hands), keeps S&M toys in the bedroom; Luciana (David Newman) her virgin sister, has evidently studied jiujitsu, and the head of the town priory, the abbess Aemelia (Chris Myles) dresses like a dominatrix and brandishes a riding crop.

A policeman (Dominic Tighe) has his own nightstick pushed up his rectum, while another (a conjurer, played by Tony Bell, and tediously embodied here as a Texas-style evangelist) suffers having a lighted sparkler inserted in the same orifice. And of course instances of old-fashioned fisticuffs are legion. The best parts of these acts of violence are the ways in which they are aurally annotated by different musical sounds. (The kazoo and the xylophone are particularly well deployed.)

The cast members sustain a high level of vigor, though they let their costumes do most of their character definition. Mr. Bruce-Lockhart, a loutish Petruchio in Propeller’s “Shrew,” makes an impression by showing his (relatively) sensitive side as the addled Antipholus of Syracuse. And he and Mr. Frame, as his Dromio, are very funny executing what is perhaps the ultimate “How fat is she?” routine.

Since nearly all the characters exist in a state of high exasperation, they tend to speak fast and frantically. This means that some of what they say will be incomprehensible to theatergoers unfamiliar with the text. What with problems of inaudibility afflicting the Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” imported British-born productions would seem to be in surprising need of elocution lessons.

THEATER REVIEW

New York Magazine

by Scott Brown

What’s the ultimate male fantasy? Not the mystical “threesome” that immediately springs to mind, nor the close runner-up, a triple-decker bacon-cheeseburger pizza that transforms into a ‘68 Charger. (I’m cribbing from my dream journal here.) No, the ultimate male fantasy is to be an innocent victim of circumstance. It’s the common theme of nearly every escapist entertainment targeted at the Y chromosome, starting with The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s original one-crazy-weekend pitch.

In a new production recently docked at BAM, Britain’s all-male Propeller troupe — who created, among other things, the testosterone-injected Henry VI remix Rose Rage — don’t scrimp on the high-speed puerility and barreling slaphappiness: Invoking Benny Hill and the Three Stooges, these “unruly boys” (often doubling as exasperated girls) plunge through Shakespeare’s thinnest and earliest comedy as if it were a Double Dare obstacle course. (The color scheme and milieu are similarly Nickelodeous: Shakespeare’s Ephesus, a town “full of cozenage” and “nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,” is transformed by Propeller vision into a resort ghetto strewn with Xmas lights and colorful trash: Tijuana-meets-Blackpool in the back of a Mexican restaurant.)

Errors is by far the Bard’s most contingency-driven play, a dude’s paradise of fault-free “mishaps.” Every unfair accusation of wrongdoing, especially sexual wrongdoing, is answerable with a perfectly honest, perfectly reasonable (if highly improbable) explanation. Two sets of identical twins (both with the name of Antipholus), each with no knowledge of his doppelgänger’s existence, create endless mischief for the other, especially when wives, girlfriends, and goldsmiths get involved. Nearly every piece of meaningful action is motivated by misunderstanding, not by character. Our two hot-blooded Antipholus (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Sam Swainsbury) and their bumbling slaves, both named Dromio (Richard Frame and Jon Trenchard) are buffoons, but blameless ones. Errors is all action and circumstantial conflict, and the Propeller fellers respond in kind with chockablock sight gags, sound effects, fart jokes, and pratfalls. Nobody stands still long enough to make his character more than a pose. (An exception is David Newman’s Luciana, the defiant bachelorette who finds her true love amid the twin-swapping confusion. P.S.: She’s also good with nunchaku. ’Cause, y’know, somebody needs to be.)

And anyway, rich interior lives aren’t what this troupe is fishing for: This is a show about squeaky leather pants, silly sombreros, and plentiful nyuk-nyuk-knuckle sandwiches for whichever Dromio happens to be within swatting range. (Frame and Trenchard both hit the deck like champs.) The Propeller Comedy of Errors is sumptuous if slightly exhausting fun — a boys’ night out that just won’t quit. Buzzkills might call it little more than a high-spirited college drag show on Red Bull and vodka, and what if it is? It’s still a hell of a lot more fun than Hall Pass

Directed by Edward Hall

“The daring, the dazzle and the pure craft of this company…absolutely exhilarating.”—The New York Times

BAM Harvey Theater

651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217

March 16, 2011

10:30am

Running Time: 2 hr. 20 min. (includes 1 intermission)

Imagine you’re on an island, unaware that your twin brother is there as well. Imagine further that your brother’s wife mistakes you for him–but not before you’ve tried to seduce his wife’s sister. Add to this marvelously byzantine mix the gender-bending antics of Edward Hall’s inimitable all-male Shakespeare troupe, Propeller, and you have The Comedy of Errors for the ages: effervescent, irreverent, and deliciously convoluted.
The creative team behind the critically lauded 2007 Spring Season productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, Hall and company handle each episode of mistaken identity with expert command. When Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant arrive in Ephesus, they have no idea that it’s also the home of their twin brothers. The result is chaos. Beatings and arrests ensue, followed by accusations of theft, infidelity, and madness. But in the end, comedy and happiness prevail, as mayhem gives way to love and reconciliation.