The opening of the new performing arts center at the World Trade Center site a year ago has done what the rebuilders had hoped it would, at least for me. On the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11, the imagery of Ground Zero, and my memory of that awful day, have been supplemented (if not yet completely replaced) by a year’s worth of memorable theatrical performances within the glowing marble cube of the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, now commonly called PAC NYC, during its eclectic and effective inaugural season.
“Our mission is to create connections,” PAC NYC’s artistic director Bill Rauch told me in an interview on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 three years ago, steeped in preparations for the center which would not open for another two years (after two decades of delay.) “Even when works of art in our building have a tragic theme (and there will be plenty of joyful projects as well), there is something inherently optimistic and hopeful about performing arts happening on this site. I absolutely believe that art is healing, and live performance has a special ability to bring people together in life-altering ways.”
“It’s time to build some new memories,” declared the first speaker at the official ribbon connection (rather than ribbon cutting) ceremony, which featured not just speakers but performances by Joshua Bell and Gavin Creel, with Laurence Fishburne in voiceover proclaiming the importance of the arts.
Five concerts on the theme of refuge launched the inaugural season a week later. I attended the one entitled “Devotion: Faith as Refuge,” four hours of stunning music that began and ended with free performances in the lobby and featured artists as varied as The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Innov Gnawa, a city-based ensemble steeped in Moroccan culture, and The Klezmatics.
Watch Night, November.
“Watch Night” is Bill T. Jones and company’s response to the mass shootings by white supremacists of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 and of eleven Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018.
It’s not a straightforward account of the two massacres or their aftermath, not documentary theater, but a gorgeously sung-through opera and stunningly staged dance theater piece that presents a series of confrontations and debates between fictionalized characters. These are lyrical expressions of harsh thoughts and unreconciled emotions. This first theater piece commissioned by PAC NYC could not feel more appropriate for its location
Is It Thursday Yet? December
It wasn’t until Jenn Freeman was thirty-three years old and a well-established dancer and choreographer that her therapist diagnosed her as having Autism Spectrum Disorder.
“To arrive at a diagnosis of ASD, we have to see a challenge in three areas; one is communication, one is socialization, and one is repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. You really are hitting all of those three marks.”
This is what we hear her therapist say in a recorded voiceover near the start of “Is It Thursday Yet?” an eclectically inventive work created just three years after Jenn Freeman’s autism diagnosis that explains and explores the way she perceives the world, using dance, theater, voiceover therapy, original songs, a dozen video monitors, several unusual props, even innovative graphic design…and more. Nothing feels out of bounds: At one point, Freeman wears a lampshade on her head, which serves as a screen for home movies from her childhood.
The Following Evening, February
When they started making theater together fifty years ago – at the same time that they started making love together, and making a life together – they’d already been eating cheap food, drinking sour coffee and putting up with bad plumbing. “This sounds like misery, but this wasn’t misery. This is just what it costs” – what it costs to do downtown theater — Paul Zimet says in “The Following Evening,” a downtown theater piece about what it’s been like to do downtown theater, featuring Talking Band, which is the name of the 50-year-old theater company led by Zimet and his wife Ellen Maddow.
“The Following Evening” is an effort to present this long-time couple’s lives in the theater, through scattershot scenes and songs, reminiscences, reveries, reflection, and re-creation
Between Two Knees, February
It’s not exactly inaccurate to describe “Between Two Knees” as a play about American Indian history told through the experience of one indigenous family over several generations, from the massacre of 1890 at Wounded Knee to the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 (Hence the title.) But that misses its subversively comic tone (Look again at the title, for its bawdy pun.) If there are some well-acted, genuinely poignant scenes, the show is at heart sketch comedy, mixing pointed parody with silly slapstick, and unafraid to be sophomoric, even when depicting atrocities.
Like They Do in the Movies, March
Laurence Fishburne is an award-winning actor who’s been in the business for more than half a century, debuting on TV at age 10, in the movies at age 12, and in a major motion picture, “Apocalypse Now” at age 15. Since then he has acted in more than seventy films that have collectively grossed more than $7.5 billion; the best-known of his film roles are probably the ones in The Matrix Trilogy, the John Wick franchise, Contagion, and as Ike Turner in the What’s Love Got to Do with It for which he was Oscar-nominated. He’s performed Off Broadway seven times, and on Broadway four, most recently in “American Buffalo” in 2022, thirty years after he won a Tony for his Broadway debut in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.”
Just about none of this is in “Like They Do in the Movies,” Fishburne’s solo show… In the more than two hours that he’s on stage – leaving only for intermission and to change outfits – he says almost nothing about his career as an actor, producer and director.
What does he say?
He tells stories. The stories, in eight different scenes or segments, range from harrowing to comic, and sometimes both; and are, he says, sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes both: He is an actor and a storyteller, he explains, “which is a polite way of saying I’ve been a bullshit artist all my life.”
The opera is based on a true story. Danny Chen, an American-born son of Chinese immigrants who grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown, committed suicide at an army post in Afghanistan in 2011 at the age of 19, after weeks of slurs, taunts, humiliating tasks and physical attacks by his superiors and fellow American soldiers.
It’s a horrible story, and it’s told powerfully
Cats: The Jellicle Ball, June
To say that I found this clever, fun-filled queering of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s idiosyncratic 1982 musical at times confusing and even annoying is only to say that it’s still “Cats” — much-loved by some, much-loathed by others, an all-but-plotless, cloying, clobbering adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s whimsical doggerel.
But audiences seem entranced by “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” judging from the loud cheering that greeted each of the characters on the night I attended this final production in the inaugural season of the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center site. And in their novel conception, co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch (artistic director of PAC NYC) also give us something new to think about.
The concept is clear enough: Rather than set among cats in a junkyard, this “Cats” is reimagined among LGBT people of color on a runway in a makeshift ballroom. Rather than just decide which of them will ascend to the Heaviside Layer (which they still do), the characters engage in a vogueing competition, rooted in the tradition of Harlem drag balls – a once-underground subculture that was chronicled in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” mainstreamed that same year by Madonna in her hit “Vogue,” and popularized for a new generation by the FX series “Pose,” starring Billy Porter and Mj Rodriguez, which ran for three seasons ending in 2021. (No coincidence that a huge rainbow fan with the word “Pose” on it is for sale in the lobby.)
Criminal Queerness Festival: The Survival, June
Since 2019, the Criminal Queerness Festival, a project of National Queer Theater, has produced playwrights from Syria, Venezuela, Uganda, Kenya, Iraq, China, Pakistan, Tanzania, Egypt, Mexico, India, Lebanon, and Poland – countries in which queer artists are treated like criminals, which is how the festival gets its name.
“The Survival” is one of the three plays that are part of this year’s festival. It is not set in some dystopian homophobic future. It’s set in Uganda, in the present day, written by an Uganda playwright Ahciro P. Olwoch, who was in effect forced out of her country.
The Future at PAC NYC: The Democracy Cycle
“Over a five-year period, The Democracy Cycle will commission and develop 25 new performing arts works across the fields of theater, dance, music, opera, and multi-disciplinary performance….
“We believe that artists are the beating heart of democratic values because of their ability to imagine new worlds, envision new possibilities, and provoke meaningful discourse across any number of divides.”
