THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 7
ILLUSTRATION BY RAPHAELLE MACARON
“Nothing happens, nobody comes,
nobody goes, it’s awful!” Who said
it: you, eight months into social dis-
tancing, or Estragon, in “Waiting for
Godot”? Samuel Beckett, the bard of
inertia, may be the man of the hour,
and few living interpreters capture his
zany despair like Bill Irwin, the actor
and master clown. Irwin has starred in
two New York productions of “Godot,”
in 1988 (as Lucky) and in 2009 (as
Vladimir, opposite Nathan Lane). In
2018, he premièred “On Beckett,”
his (mostly) one-man show grappling
with all things Beckett, at the Irish
Repertory Theatre. Now he has re-
conceived the show as part of the Irish
Rep’s digital fall season, tailoring it to
the comedy and the tragedy of this
Beckettian year. It can be seen Nov. 17-
22, at irishrep.org.—Michael Schulman
THEATREONLINE
Mark Morris Dance Group
Forty years ago, Mark Morris and a bunch of
his dancer friends got together and formed the
Mark Morris Dance Group. Back then, they
had just two engagements a year, one in New
York and the other in Seattle, Morris’s home
town. Now the company has its own building
and school, though both stand mostly empty at
the moment. But the company forges on, with
a season of virtual performances that begin, on
Nov. 12, with a program of dances by Morris,
live-streamed on Zoom and YouTube. A similar
evening, in May, yielded a quartet of witty, clever
works, filmed both outdoors and in apartments.
This one includes an adaptation of Morris’s mys-
tical opera-ballet “Layla and Majnun,” based on
the eponymous opera by the Azerbaijani com-
poser Uzeyir Hajibeyov, and a new work set to
Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” All are introduced by
Mark Morris, who is, incidentally, a very funny
man.—M.H. (mmdg.org/forty)
1
MOVIES
The Bride Wore Red
The director Dorothy Arzner infuses this glossy
romantic comedy, from 1937, set in the pleasure
domes of Europe, with acrid insight and theatri-
cal flair. In Trieste, a cynical aristocrat (George
Zucco) hires Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford), a
dive-bar singer and taxi dancer (and, it’s hinted,
a prostitute) to impersonate an aristocrat at a
swank Alpine resort. There, newly christened as
Anni Vivaldi, glamorous and bewitching in her
finery, she turns the heads of many men—includ-
ing the whimsical local postman (the impulsively
imaginative Franchot Tone, Crawford’s then hus-
band)—and schemes to marry another aristocrat
(Robert Young) who’s engaged to a woman from
his own set (Lynne Carver). Arzner looks with
enormous empathy at Anni’s furious desperation,
1
DANCE
Aakash Odedra Company
Born in Birmingham, England, and trained in
the northern Indian dance form kathak, Aakash
Odedra came to prominence after performing
a solo created by a fellow-Brit, the contempo-
rary choreographer Akram Khan. Like Khan,
Odedra creates dance-theatre pieces based in a
hybrid language that combines kathak, his own
personal vocabulary of movement, storytelling,
and a highly theatrical use of the stage. The
Arts Center at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi streams two
of his recent works, “Murmur 2.0” (Nov. 11)—a
solo show that explores his childhood struggle
with dyslexia—and “#JeSuis” (Nov. 12), on its
Web site, where they will remain available for
a week. The latter piece, a collaboration with
a group of Turkish dancers, is a more politi-
cal work that delves into the feelings of fear,
claustrophobia, and displacement experienced
by people living in conflict zones.—Marina
Harss (nyuad-artscenter.org/en_US/events/2020)
DanceNow
The third chapter of DanceNow’s twenty-fifth-
anniversary virtual programming launches on
Nov. 12, with three more premières. Orlando
Hernández, a onetime tap prodigy who’s grown
into a history-mining experimentalist, presents
a duet with the actress Octavia Chavez-Rich-
mond. Mariana Valencia, who handles heavy
topics with humor, channels a favorite charac-
ter, the news anchor Edna Schmidt, delivering
a report from home. And Nicole Vaughan-Diaz,
in a film shot in the wilderness of North Car-
olina, examines two people losing their sanity
in isolation.—Brian Seibert (dancenow.online)
JoyceStream
In its digital programming, the Joyce Theatre
continues to avoid the usual suspects in favor of
artists who deserve more attention. The latest
collection, available through Dec. 6, features
illuminating samplers from Thunderbird Amer-
ican Indian Dancers and the inclusive Pioneer
Winter Collective, based in Miami. In “Fecha
Límite” (“Expiration Date”), the Afro-Colom-
bian troupe Sankofa Danzafro supplely synchro-
nizes with drums, developing a rich metaphor
of balance with wooden bowls. Best of all is the
New York tap dancer Michela Marino Lerman
and her amazing band of dancers and musicians,
Love Movement, in a knockout set filmed at
the Whitney Museum last year. Caravanning
around a jazz exhibit, effortlessly slipping into
wide-ranging styles, they embody collective
music-making at its most soul-warming and
joyous.—B.S. (joyce.org/joycestream)
which Crawford embodies with her unique blend
of ferocity and yearning. The recklessly unstable
tale whirls ahead with a wild panoply of twists
and wily intrigue, leaving the impression of high
society as a sham that dispenses its rewards to the
unworthy.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon
and iTunes.)
The Climb
This bromantic comedy, spanning years in the
rocky relationship of two longtime best friends
on the road to middle age, delivers dollops of
sentiment with forced cleverness. The direc-
tor, Michael Angelo Covino, plays the athletic
Mike, who, on a biking trip in France with his
buddy Kyle (Kyle Marvin), a nerdy musician,
confesses to an affair with Kyle’s fiancée, Ava
(Judith Godrèche), resulting in the end of both
the friendship and the engagement. Years later,
when Mike faces hard times, Kyle shows up to
console him—and Kyle’s big, warm, loud family
also welcomes the prodigal friend, leading to
complications with Kyle’s new fiancée, Marissa
(Gayle Rankin). The film (which Covino and
Marvin co-wrote) comprises seven discrete ep-
isodes, shot in intricately roving long takes of
stage-precise, stiffly written scenes; the elabo-
rate choreography for camera and actors is the
movie’s main distinction. Though the characters
range from ciphers to clichés, they nonetheless
get caught in some unusual comedic tangles that
Covino laces with heartfelt observations.—R.B.
(In wide theatrical release.)
Eve’s Bayou
The writer and director Kasi Lemmons, in her
first feature, from 1997, blends history and fam-
ily, melodrama and metaphysics, in a boldly
imaginative, sharply observed coming-of-age
story. It’s set in a Creole community in rural
Louisiana in the early nineteen-sixties. Jurnee
Smollett stars as Eve Batiste, the ten-year-old
daughter of a prominent local doctor (SamuelL.
the seminal influence of Orozco and Sique-
iros on the young Jackson Pollock. But, with
some two hundred works by sixty artists and
abundant documentary material, the curator
Barbara Haskell reweaves the sense and sen-
sations of the time to bring it alive. Without
the Mexican precedents of amplified scale and
passionate vigor, the development of Abstract
Expressionism lacks crucial sense. As for the
politics, consider the persistently leftward tilt
of American art culture ever since—a residual
hankering, however sotto voce, to change the
world.—Peter Schjeldahl (whitney.org)
