The Bloody Apple
An exhibit of Weegee’s photographs proves that crime does pay
By Mark Peikert
In the pantheon of New Yorkers—Dorothy Parker, Andy Warhol, the Ramones—photographer Weegee may not be the first to spring to mind, but he may symbolize the contradictions of New York City better than anyone else. Driven, self-mythologizing and morbidly curious about the curiously morbid, Weegee spent a decade, from 1936 to 1947, chronicling the violence and urban beauty of life in the Big Apple. Read more
Oh, Say Can You See The Met’s New American Wing
By Anam Baig
American art has made a comeback at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The third and final phase of the museum’s 10-year, $100 million project is complete, and 26 newly designed galleries will be opened to the public this Monday.
First opened in 1924, The Met’s American Wing originally only displayed decorative arts, such as furniture and silverware, through the medium of period rooms. In the 1930s, paintings started coming in, and by the 1980s, galleries were opened to display the paintings. Read more
Double Exposure
Career nanny Vivian Maier’s posthumous recognition as a photographer
By Penny Gray
The Howard Greenberg Gallery has just opened an exhibition of the photographic works of Vivian Maier (1926–2009) from the Maloof Collection. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because Maier’s work is a recent discovery.
Tea and Sympathy—With an Edge
By Mark Peikert
Site-specific theater, the latest innovation in freeing audiences from the shackles of the proscenium, went from being an oddball concept to full-fledged event this past spring with the premiere of Sleep No More. A radical, immersive retelling of Macbeth, the Meatpacking District warehouse-turned-creepily louche hotel had everyone raving about becoming part of the performance—and producers eagerly booking more intuitive locations for shows.
After Woodshed Collective commandeered West End Presbyterian Church this summer for The Tenant, a trio of theater companies are collaborating on the East Side with David Adjmi’s Elective Affinities, performed in a secret Upper East Side townhouse, the address of which is only revealed to ticket buyers. But though Soho Rep, piece by piece productions and Rising Phoenix Repertory are on trend with their production of Adjmi’s one-person show, Adjmi himself is reluctant to describe the site-specific movement as a trend.
“I don’t think it should be a trend,” he said. “There are other ways of making theater. I love these nonprofit theaters in New York and I like the idea of puncturing the habit of what we think theater has to be. I think it’s important that people come to these plays and they’re destabilized.”
Audience members will be transformed into visitors to the well-appointed home of octogenarian Alice Hauptmann, played here by Tony Award winner Zoe Caldwell. “On one level, it’s a comedy about a very wealthy woman fighting for her way of life. And on a much more profound level, it’s about a surrender to outside forces,” Adjmi explained. “It’s short and it’s very barbed and it’s very funny. It’s kind of whipped cream and razor blades.”
Though Elective Affinities was originally commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005 on a stage, Adjmi’s fantasy while writing the play was always that it be performed in an immersive environment. When piece by piece’s Wendy vanden Heuvel—a good friend of Adjmi’s—expressed an interest in including Elective Affinities in a larger festival of plays, Adjmi casually mentioned that he’d always considered the play an ideal candidate for a site-specific production.
Of course, transferring what was once produced on a stage into something that could fit into an actual apartment required some changes.
“I have had to tweak things,” Adjmi said. “It’s a whole event now. We’ve constructed an entire simulacrum of this character’s life. There’s all this new stuff, but [director] Sarah Benson and I are having a lot of fun coming up with what that is.”
Part of that fun comes from working with a theatrical icon like Caldwell. Adjmi—no slouch in the honorarium department himself, having been awarded, among others, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award and the Kesselring Prize for playwriting—described the experience of this incarnation of Elective Affinities as “surreal.”
“I was so scared of her,” he said with a laugh. “And she was scared of me, because she loves writing and she loves doing this play. And then we met and it was like a love affair. She’s so gentle and so unbelievably humble, and she’s rigorous about the text and the punctuation. I find it incredibly refreshing. I don’t write for grammatical correctness, I write for rhythm and inflection and pacing, and she is a genius with it. I feel like it’s really delicious when we’re in rehearsal together.”
Caldwell’s presence—and the chance to watch a pro like her at such close range—is certainly one of the reasons why the entire run of Elective Affinities sold out almost immediately (though some tickets may be made available on the day of performances). But as Adjmi points out, theatergoers are getting a lot more for the cost of their ticket than just stargazing.
“The intimacy of being in the room with the person shifts your relationship with the play,” he said. “There’s a conversation happening, so once you’re in the conversation, it just engages different faculties in people.”
Lawyer’s Love Affair with Photography
By Laura Shin
In the late 1960s, a young woman sought the help of a lawyer. That’s how former art director Joan Niborg first met trial lawyer and photographer Len Speier.
“It was love at first sight,” Speier said.
Read more
A Verdi Opera in Arty Hands
The Met does La traviata, and the Manhattan School does a Hoiby opera, plus other sleepers
The Metropolitan Opera has a new production of La traviata, though it is not really new: It is simply new to New York. This production, by the German director Willy Decker, debuted in Salzburg in 2005. The principal singers were Anna Netrebko (Violetta), Rolando Villazón (Alfredo) and Thomas Hampson (Germont). It was the sensation of the summer, maybe even the sensation of the year. The following summer, someone involved in that production said to me, “There was an awful lot of hype surrounding that show, wasn’t there?” I said, “Maybe. But I have to tell you: I have never been more moved in a theater.” Read more
AVENUE Armory Show a Hit
By Molly Garcia
The 2010 AVENUE Antiques & Art at the Armory show opened last week, from Sept. 29 through Oct. 3, with more than 60 exhibitors. Over 1,000 visitors enjoyed the open bar and passed apps as they strolled down the aisles of the show during the special VIP event, and more than 6,000 attended over the course of the four-day event. Read more
An Animated City Council
An old saying about politics is that it is Hollywood for ugly people. But Lauri Apple, a Chicago-based artist and political writer, believes politics—or, at least, the New York City Council—is more like high school.
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Not-So-Fun City
By Dan Rivoli
The most striking image of the John Lindsay exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is a blown-up New York Times Magazine cover from 1973. The cover is a photo of Lindsay’s face that shows how events during his seven years as mayor of New York City ravaged his youthful looks: a white line connects welfare to his grayed temples; the 1969 Queens snowstorm put a crease around his mouth; the long, hot summer of 1966 deepened the frown lines on his forehead. Read more
Haute Flea
Gone are the days of roaming the flea market on Avenue A and finding vintage T-shirts, old records and the guys from Interpol sulking on a Sunday afternoon. Starting this weekend, though, there’s MARTE on 3rd, a weekend market featuring clothing from designer Jackie Hates You, customized housewares from Lightexture, snacks from Georgia’s Eastside BBQ and eTon and plenty more. (MARTE, by the way, stands for Manhattan Artisan Retail & Trade Emporiums.) Read more
