Liberation (5*)

I couldn't help it, thoughts of Taylor Swift kept intruding while I absorbed a kinda heartbreaking critique of feminism in Liberation, a self-described memory play that examines the lives of five women, all members of a women's consciousness-raising group that meets in an Ohio recreation center with a basketball court.  "19:70" appears on the scoreboard.

Lizzie (Susannah Flood, flakey but sincere) welcomes the audience as well as the women with a mission statement:  in a double role, she's going to interrogate how her mother, the kind of woman she never has wanted to become, could have organized the group and what happened to its members over the last 50 years. Playwright (and Gen Xer) Bess Wohl uses the first act of Liberation to introduce the era's archetypes including Margie (Betsy Aidem, who transcends cliche oh-so-movingly), a semi-embittered housewife; Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd, fierce), an Angela Davis lookalike with her short Afro and hexagonal glasses, convinced of her acute intelligence but hiding a secret; Susan (Adina Verson, fiercer) a radical Marxist lesbian, who believes only artificial wombs will save humankind; and Dora (Audrey Corsa, FANTAStic), a Barbie whose brainpower, if not her sexual pleasure, is on par with her good fortune and determination.  Only Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio, galvanizing) as an Italian immigrant with peculiar politics, seemed unfamiliar to this regular reader of popular feminist fiction back in the day (The Bluest Eye, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Fear of Flying, Rubyfruit Jungle & The Women's Room, off the top of my head, in chronological order).  The women's interactions are fairly predictable, too, as their "community" and politics evolve but watching the winning cast establish their characters is thoroughly enjoyable. 

To feminize a male metaphor, director Whitney White (Saturday Church) takes off the gloves in the second act, after the brief but critical appearance of Bill (Charlie Thurston, persuasively anodyne) the chivalrous, ambitious hunk who competes with Lizze to clear the meeting chairs before shooting some hoops.  Sparks fly and Lizzie turns her mother's role over to Susan (Kayla Davion, fiercest) because "it would be creepy" for a daughter to be sexually interested in her father, and begins watching the action instead of participating in it, an effective sleight of theatrical hand.  Susan, as a woman with four kids who, like Bill, hasn't been given much to do in the first act, dominates the second playing both Black and white and poor and privileged characters, a performance that serves as a powerful metaphor for what appears to be Wohl's theme:  as much as women's age, bodies, class, race and sexual orientation differ they all face the same challenges when fighting for equality, challenges that have diminished over time but remain formidable particularly in the face of love, the chemical reaction that fuels human reproduction for the majority of people.

Which brings me back to Taylor Swift, who from this fangirl's perspective seems to have it all.  The megastar's track record prior to her engagement and the release of her latest album surely more than qualifies her as a contemporary feminist icon.  To cite just three examples:  as a young woman, she successfully sued a radio promoter who grabbed her ass; her lyrics for "The Man" offered the most tuneful, transgressive and amusing distillation of sexism to ever appear on a pop album; and she re-mastered much of her back catalog when a male recording executive refused to sell them back to her, a seemingly impossible feat.

Now, in The Life of a Showgirl, Swift admits that she lied when she said "I don't believe in marriage" ("Eldest Daughter"); she's queerbaiting in a public catfight with another pop star ("Actually Romantic"); and she's rhapsodizing about her fiancé's endowment ("Wood").  I can't say that I'm looking forward to her songs about motherhood.

Lizzie, look no further than basic biology for the answer to your question.  Maybe Susan is right about those artificial wombs, after all.

*  *  *  *

Liberation, because of its second-act shocker, has a better reason than inconsiderate people to insist that audience members secure their phones in Yondr pouches upon arrival at the theater.  For me it's a worthwhile inconvenience because use of phones during live performances and movies DRIVES ME NUTS.  So when I sat down in my orchestra seat and immediately spotted a masked woman about my age in front of me removing her phone from her purse, I confronted her. 

"You know, you're supposed to check your phone upon entering the theater," I admonished. 

"You don't understand, sir" her companion, also masked, replied.  "She's got diabetes."

"Oh yeah?  What did she do before she had a phone?" I snapped.

"It's none of your business," replied the diabetic who continued to scroll her phone in a manner that suggested she wasn't monitoring her blood sugar.

Furious at the insensitivity of an individual who would use her phone in a theater where everyone else had been denied access to theirs, I got up from my seat to look for an usher. "If she's wearing a white band around her wrist, it's OK now, but not during the show," the usher explained.  Somewhat chastened, I returned to my seat where the woman's scrolling continued on and off with nervous looks over her shoulder until Liberation began.  I couldn't see if she was wearing a white band or not.

As soon as the curtain dropped for intermission, out came her phone.  She briefly checked her mail, but returned it to her purse as soon as she heard me scoff in disgust.  Fifteen minutes without my phone gave me even more time to stew.

Am I the asshole?  Would I have confronted a man in the same situation?

Little Bear Ridge Road (3*)

 

Call me shallow, but enduring 90 minutes of mostly misery isn't how I want to spend a night on Broadway, even at reduced prices.  Based on "Little Bear Ridge Road," and "The Whale," the film adaptation of his 2012 drama, playwright Samuel D. Hunter seems to specialize in gay men in flyover country whose sense of victimhood gets in the way of their lives.  

Ethan (Micah Stock), a sad sack, shows up at the rural Idaho home of his aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalfe), bearing a grudge he has nursed since the age of ten, to settle the estate of his estranged father, a meth addict.  He's masked and within the first few minutes, the audience understands this is a Pandemic play with a capital "P," although covid isn't primarily responsible for the mismatched pair's isolation.  Sarah vacuums, Ethan mopes and they watch a series that may or may not feature aliens from a double Barcalounger, the only piece of furniture on stage.  It hints at a long-gone lover or husband.  

The "action" jumps forward quickly; along the way, Ethan hooks up with a budding astrophysicist whose metaphor about star watching forecasts the play's teachable moment (duh!), and Sarah, a nurse, is forced to disclose her treatment for cancer.  Before you know it, the pandemic is over and Ethan has begun to mirror his aunt's spirit but when given an opportunity to change his life, he scrolls his phone instead.  Director Joe Mantello more subtly indicts the role technology has had in stunting our emotional lives with "content" always distantly audible in the background.

Much of the audience found the characters' mostly tentative interactions funny, guffawing as if they were watching an episode of Roseanne, and may have come to see Metcalfe personify irascibility which she does, faultlessly.  The bond she develops with James (John Drea, pitch perfect in his kind befuddlement) suggests she wasn't always the fighter she is now, no thanks to Hunter, who provides so little backstory for either character that the audience is left to project their own motivations.

There's redemption, of a kind, narrated by a competent health care professional who can't pronounce "infinitesimal."  I didn't believe it for a moment.  People don't really change. Somewhere in Portland, Ethan is still feeling sorry for himself while James enjoys the kind of life available to most self-respecting gay men who get their asses to a big city.

Saturday Church (5*)

 I bought a ticket for a show celebrating queens before I knew the matinee at the New York Theater Workshop would be taking place on a day of nationwide "No Kings" protests.  I probably should feel guilty for enjoying myself as much as I did, but at least Saturday Night Church, based on a little-seen 2018 movie, offered a mostly Black universe where love finally trumps hate.

Imagine Pose, Ryan Murphy's indelible FX series about ballroom culture, scored by Sia and you'll get the idea.  It's true that we've seen this story many times before, although perhaps not presided over by a Black Jesus in drag.  Silly me, I didn't even realize that J. Harrison Ghee, Tony Award winner for Some Like It Hot, was performing that role as well as that of the butch Pastor Lewis until I glanced at the program during intermission.  He believably (and sympathetically) embodies both characters while towering over the rest of the cast not because he's more talented but because he's sooooo damn BIG, especially in platform boots.

But the real draw here is the vibe conjured by a fairly large and always exuberant cast with no weak links, the kind of pipes I always thought I might hear if I went to Sunday services in Harlem and the footwork of the Globetrotters.  As Ulysses, 2025 Voice contestant Bryson Battle sings like an angel and convincingly behaves like one, too.  Young Jackson Kanawha Perry, as the tender teen hustler who introduces him to his true self, has charisma to spare, and B Noel Thomas, the house mother nursing other ambitions, exudes a maternal warmth that runs as deep as her décolletage. 

Director Whitney White keeps things moving as fluidly as Michael Bennett did in Dreamgirls, no easy feat on an off-Broadway budget.  Saturday Church begins and ends with the kind of ferocious energy I've rarely seen sustained for more than two hours, although Hell's Kitchen did come close.  During the finale, everybody--including the too-busy blood mother (Christina Sajous) and frightened aunt (Joaquina Kalukango) whose resistance you know will eventually be overcome--gets to compete on the runway.  Aside from the WOW factor of Kalukango's Easter-appropriate costume, designed by the surely fabulous Qween Jean, it comes as no surprise but the house goes nuts anyway.

Broadway is about to have its own ballroom culture moment when Cats: The Jellicle Ball opens in March.    Producers should make room for Saturday Night Church, too!

Hell's Kitchen (4*)

For some reason, Alicia Keys had never been on a Chiffon playlist; as I scanned the musical numbers in the Playbill for Hell's Kitchen, I recognized only one, "Empire State of Mind," a song I associated more with Jay Z.  Definitely a blind spot and my loss for the past two decades.  

Set for the most part in Manhattan Plaza, where Keyes grew up, Hell's Kitchen resonated for a personal reason, too.  Barnet, one of the buildings earliest tenants, lived there with a spectacular view of the George Washington Bridge when we met, four years before the musical prodigy was born in 1981. The one-room apartment where Ali and her mother resided was the same size as Barnet's, and I recall listening with excitement to his stories of riding the elevator with Angela Lansbury.  And early in our relationship my encounters with the doormen, typically Black men like the ever-reliable Ray (Oscar Whitney, Jr.), were frequent.

From "Gospel," the super kinetic opening number, bolstered by vivid projections of the 'hood and multi-purpose scaffolding that emphasizes the high rise of Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen felt true to me in ways that other juke box musicals haven't, perhaps because it focuses strictly on the most relatable years before its adolescent subject became famous, while she banked the experience she eventually communicated through song. Has the Hudson ever served as a more relevant metaphor than it does in "River," plaintively sung by Amanda Reid, a fellow Texan making her Broadway debut? 

The production reminded me for the umpteenth time how much talent there is on Broadway.  Although I wasn't familiar with the 2024 Tony winners for Best Actress and Best Featured Actress in a Musical, the energetic and diverse cast, and first-rate band had the joint stompin' and shoutin', particularly during "Kaleidoscope," a new song Keys wrote for the show, when I almost felt young and hopeful enough to be dancing in the aisles along with them.  Jessica Vosk, as a strict mom, and Angela Birchett, an understudy who played Miss Liza Jane, Keyes's beloved mentor, both deliver powerhouse vocal performances that bring down the house.  Though Philip Johnson Richardson and Benjamin H. Moore don't have as much to do in what is essentially a thin but still resolutely feminist book, they sing well and deliver performances that add social justice nuance to stereotypes of sensitive, sexy men.  Speaking of sexy men, I have a weakness for chorus boys, but few have commanded the stage the way that Eliazar Jimenez does, tirelessly.

As for "Empire State of Mind," the closing number: let me just say I fell in love with my adopted city all over again, with the now besieged Statue of Liberty still capable of bringing tears to my cynical eyes.

Chiffon went to sleep listening to Alicia Keys "Essentials" on Apple Music and put the original cast recording of Hell's Kitchen on repeat the next morning.  Congratulations, Ms. Keyes, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown for raising the juke-box-musical bar as high as Barnet's apartment on the 37th floor.

Lazarus Man (4*)

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the novels of Richard Price, which I've been reading for as long as I've lived in New York.  That's due at least in part to his gifts as a prolific writer for both film (his Oscar-nominated gig as author of The Color of Money screenplay) and television which left less time for publishing books.  No doubt his nitty gritty contributions to both The Wire and The Deuce helped make those HBO productions among my favorite series of all time with their realistic depictions of the way that ordinary people talk and behave.

In Lazarus Man he's back to the south Bronx, his home turf, where a building has collapsed. Price is less interested in what caused the disaster--although he does nod cursorily to the callous corruption that generally accompanies real estate development in New York City--than its impact on people in the neighborhood.  His characters include a biracial recovering addict who survives the collapse and whose journey gives the book its title; a separated cop on the community relations beat who obsesses over a missing person while semi-neglecting her two children; a Black undertaker who fears he may lose his parking area to a community garden; and a young photographer from upstate New York whose work provides an essential clue to Price's theme.  All, including the woman and half a dozen secondary characters, are what Mr. LaGrone, my enriched English teacher in high school, would have described as "well-rounded" and Price orchestrates their interactions with the kind of naturalism familiar to anyone who has walked the borough's mean streets. 

While there are no big revelations or epiphanies in the somewhat meandering Lazarus Man, it is the kind of sympathetic book only a man who has lived a long life could write.  In the larger scheme of things, faith is more important to Price--who survived his own struggles with cocaine-- and can be more life-changing than knowing the truth.

“I’m not one to talk about religion [says Anthony, the recovering addict] but it’s like God buried me under that earth, wiped my slate clean, then brought me back up to be who I never thought I could be before … And all I want, all I want now, is to be worthy of that gift and … and to be…”

If only I could believe that . . . 

Museo Revoltella

The Venetian refugee whose bequest established the museum named after him died a century before the current administrators chose this arresting 1968 painting by Leonor Fini to market its idiosyncratic collection.

Two-year-old Pasquale Revoltella arrived with his family in Trieste after the Republic of Venice finally collapsed at the tail end of the 18th century, ending more than a millennium of Doge rule.  He got his start in business importing grain and timber before becoming a financier determined to make his adopted city one of Europe's most important ports. A globalist visionary, Revoltella facilitated the introduction of the Frenchman who developed the Suez Canal to Archduke Maximilian while the latter was building Castello di Miramare, gaining critical buy-in from the Hapsburg monarchy which then ruled Trieste.

What was good for Trieste was good for Revoltella but as a hand-on kind of guy, he also became an official member of the development team and took a long journey to the operations site in Egypt. A museum gallery includes evocative paintings of the canal's construction as well as his travel journal.

Revoltella also clearly had high regard for himself.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!

But it's also fun to speculate about the sexual orientation of lifelong bachelors, particularly when the museum website struggles to identify how Revotella met the Berlin architect, a decade younger, who designed the striking neo-Renaissance home that eventually became the museum.  

Barone Pasquale Revoltella (1795 – 1869)

Shortly before his death, Revoltella was named a baron of the Austrian empire.  He left not only his home and art collection to Trieste, but a fortune that has endowed museum's capital expansion (two other buildings have been added) and the continuous acquisition of Italian art.  

I started on the ground floor of Revoltella's former home where this statue, at the base of stair case that rises three floors, allegorically commemorates the construction of mid-nineteenth century waterworks in Trieste.  Opting for allegory instead of branding--how quaint!

"Fountain of the Aurisina Nymph" by Pietro Magni (1858)

Revoltella's art collection is displayed in his private apartments.  

Napoleon I by Jean Antoine Houdon (1806)

After only a day in Italy, it had become clear that a bust of Dante was de rigueur in upper-class households.

Dante Alighieri by Vincenzo Vela (19th Century)

Valentino Valle & His Daughter by Giuseppe Tominz (ca 1829)

Another allegorical sculpture by Pietro Magni commands attention on the first floor.  According to the museum's website "A graceful female figure, representing Europe, unites the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea – two male figure sitting by her side and holding her hand. At the centre the god Mercury benevolently observes the event and indicates to Navigation the new route."

"The Cutting of the Suez Isthmus" (1863)

Here's the same sculpture, seen from the floor above.  The figure on the upper left--a genie--less allegorically records the names of the canal's developers. 

"La Maschera" by Joseph Desire Court (19th century)

The upper floors of the museum exhibit works--all by Italians--acquired after Revoltella's death but this ornate triptych definitely captures his major interests.

"The Triptych Navigation, Art & History" by Eugenio Scomparini (1886)

"Estate" by Marcello Mascherini (1936)

One gallery recreates the studio of local artist Rovan Ruggero.  He both painted and sculpted (left) his own image during a long career that lasted much of the 20th century.

"Return of Ulysses" by Ettore Tito (20th Century)

"Master Taking Care of the Dog" by Antonio Rotta (1861)

"The Napoleonic Legionary" by Vincenzo Cabianca (1856)

Self Portrait by Mario Lannes (1929)

"Enchanted Rock" by Arturo Nathan (1931)

I was familiar only with the work of this artist.

"Gladiators & Referee by Giorgio de Chirico (ca 1932)

The Gulf of Trieste is visible from the top floors and roof.

"Leopard" by Tristano Alberti (ca 1950)

Google couldn't help me identify this sculpture near the museum's entrance.

 

More Northern Italy

Trieste

Sunny Trieste

Castello di Miramare

Museo Joyce

Museo Joyce

Thanks to an out-of-date guidebook, I found an unexpected delight--the best kind--awaiting me at a library that once housed a small collection of materials related to the Irish author's residence in Trieste.

While James Joyce is perhaps the most internationally renowned author associated with Trieste, he's hardly the only one. The city decided to celebrate its literary history by building the Museo LET"S, or museum of literature, which includes the Museo Joyce. Its opening in 2024 coincided with the 70th anniversary of Trieste's "definitive" return to Italy. Joyce himself may not have have appreciated the tie-in, as dissatisfaction with Italian rule was a factor in his decision to leave the city for good in 1919.

LET"S is as welcoming as a cozy bookstore.

A newsstand collection celebrates coverage of the city in print media

Italian movie stars--even those from Naples--sold plenty of magazines in the Fifties and Sixties.

Posters for films featuring Trieste comprise one gallery, with an adjacent theater showing actual clips.

Coincidentally, when I returned to my hotel room, the New York Times reported the death of Claudia Cardinale, "Italy's Girlfriend."  The obituary makes no mention of Senilita, but you can watch it on YouTube.

Soft lighting and a black leather couch, the kind you would expect to find in a shrink's office, seduced me into taking a break in another gallery.

Jet lag prevented me from paying closer attention to the genesis of the strange but compelling film I watched about Trieste's relationship with psychoanalysis. At the age of twenty, Freud spent time in the historically unmoored city (then part of Austria) working in a zoological institute associated with the University of Vienna. His research? Searching (fruitlessly) for the reproductive organs of male eels! His time in Trieste seems to influenced his psychoanalytic theories.

I foggily seem to remember the film's narration is excerpted from a novel written by Italo Svevo, one of two local writers whose careers LET'S also examines comprehensively.  A statue of Svevo greets visitors outside the museum.  The colored fabric behind him memorializes "the victims of femicide, lesbicide and transfemicide."

Likeness as literary metaphor!

Joyce and Svevo became besties when the former championed Zeno's Conscience, rescuing the novel--in which a psychoanalyst prescribes memoir-writing as a form of therapy (I can relate to that!)--from obscurity.

Joyce also drew the Jewishness of Leopold Bloom, a fictional character so iconic that his birthday is celebrated by English majors worldwide, from Svevo.

The text-heaviness of the museum's Joyce section was a bit of a let down in this multimedia context.

While living in Trieste for two periods that altogether lasted more than 15 years before and after World War I, Joyce re-worked the essay that eventually became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, completed Dubliners, the short story collection that includes "The Dead," and began conceiving Ulysses, his masterwork.  

Early 20th century film footage of life in Trieste during Joyce's residence supplement the detailed timeline of his life.  

But as you can see from my smile, the part of the museum I liked the most exhibited Ulysses-related art.

Illustration for Bloomsday Trieste by Robert Berry (2013)

"Calypso Breakfast, Bloomsday Trieste" by Paolo Colombo (2011)

Note the similarity of Leopold's mustache and hat to Svevo in the photo above.  The entirety of the VERY long novel takes place on June 16, 1904, forever to be known as Bloomsday.

Bloomsday Poster (2019)

Bloomsday Poster (2020)

 "Telecali Macoypso, Bloomsday Trieste" by Andy Prisney (panels 1& 2, 2021)

I wonder if LET"S would be interested in acquiring this poster which has adorned 47 Pianos since 1982 when I publicized the traveling exhibit for The New York Public Library?

More Northern Italy

Trieste

Sunny Trieste

Castello di Miramare

Museo Revoltella