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As part of its third program at the Joyce Theater, Pilobolus unveiled a work that broke the company’s artistic mold. For “Contradance,” receiving its New York premiere on Monday evening, two former dancers choreographed a production without the assistance of one of Pilobolus’s artistic directors.
Matt Kent and Renée Jaworski (the group’s rehearsal director and artistic associate) tell a story of two misfits who find a connection one soulful night. “Contradance” also features music by Dan Zanes, who leads a family-oriented, Grammy-winning band. While the work doesn’t herald a fresh choreographic voice within the Pilobolus family, the pairing of Mr. Zanes’s music and Liz Prince’s costumes lends a certain dreaminess to the production.
The dance for six — it was created in collaboration with Winston Dynamite Brown, Eriko Jimbo, Jun Kuribayashi, Nile H. Russell, Annika Sheaff and Christopher Whitney, as well as others — focuses on an outcast (Mr. Kuribayashi, who is never too far from his rocking chair) and a demure young woman (Ms. Jimbo). Her friends, who clamp kazoos in their mouths like cigars, try to prevent her from getting too close to the stranger. The couple nevertheless find love: as Mr. Zanes puts it, “two misfits on the endless sea, drifting so easy and free.”
Eventually, the boy-meets-girl routine grows tiresome; often Mr. Kent and Ms. Jaworski don’t have enough material to fill the music. Poised on the rocking chair — which, at one point, becomes something of a boat — the couple sway back and forth. Ms. Jimbo holds a tattered umbrella and suddenly, held aloft by the other dancers, she and Mr. Kuribayashi soar through the night.
In the end, “Contradance” is too naïve for adult consumption. (There’s also something about the dance that resembles a Kindle commercial.)
Far more enthralling is “Gnomen,” a dance for four men choreographed in 1997 by Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken, in collaboration with the original dancers. On Monday Mr. Brown, Mr. Kuribayashi, Mr. Russell and Mr. Whitney — as if linked by strands of silk — moved through rigorous, sculptural positions with a startling airiness. The theme of an outsider is present, but here the result has weight.
Pilobolus continues through Aug. 7 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org. -
HOBOKEN, N.J. — John McCauley, gaunt and scraggly, clutched an electric guitar at Maxwell’s here on Monday night, finger-picking a lone song, “Houston, TX,” by himself. His band, Deer Tick, had spent the past hour digging into roadhouse country and rawboned rock ’n’ roll, with a bluntly effective fervor. This solo interlude seemed like an unscheduled detour, announced on the fly. But it was a clear, vital moment in an unfocused show.
“Houston, TX” comes from “Born on Flag Day” (Partisan), Deer Tick’s winningly ragged 2009 album, and in the original arrangement it’s a lilting shuffle, offered in tribute to the Bakersfield sound. Here, Mr. McCauley made it more desperate, nearly unmoored. His voice — tart, coarse, with a liberal pinch of twang — felt painfully exposed, adding weight to his lyrics about cutting loose from an exhausted love affair.
“There’s nothing left,” he sang, “and I am sure that it’s a sign/That maybe I’m about as good as gone.” The shift from “sure” to “maybe” in those lines felt awkwardly true to the song, and so did a later jolt of self-reproach: “I ain’t gonna talk like a gentleman, no/‘Cause I’m sick of always letting myself down.” Pulling back from the microphone as if repulsed, Mr. McCauley yelped that last word again: “Down! Down!”
Since forming Deer Tick in Providence, R.I., late in 2004, Mr. McCauley has been both its engine and its engineer. Last month brought “The Black Dirt Sessions” (Partisan), another album stocked with his cagey, questioning songs. But Deer Tick, whose current tour will end on Aug. 13 at Webster Hall in Manhattan, seems to be in some kind of flux: this show included just a handful of tunes from the new release, most of them tossed off or hurried through. And the band’s frontman often took a backseat.
He surrendered the wheel mostly to Ian O’Neil, the other guitarist in Deer Tick, and increasingly its other songwriter. “Hope Is Big,” one of Mr. O’Neil’s better songs, took the form of a heaving country waltz. Elsewhere he leaned more toward snarling honky-tonk, as on a stomping cover of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” Mr. O’Neil was merely serviceable as a singer, which at least put him ahead of the band’s Amish-bearded drummer, Dennis Ryan, whose take on Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was pure stunt work, a floppy salute to Jack Black.
Stunts can be fine, and Deer Tick delivered a few that worked: a furious romp through ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses,” for one, and a perfectly smarmy alto saxophone solo by Rob Crowell, the band’s keyboardist, on “Ashamed.” That song had the crowd singing along with its chorus: “And oh, what a crying shame, what a crying shame/What we became.”
It would be wrong and too facile to apply that lamentation to Deer Tick, which has a lot going for it as a band. But with the way things are headed, Mr. McCauley might consider a side project: solo acoustic, perhaps, so he could move along without actually moving on.
Deer Tick will appear on Wednesday at Ottobar in Baltimore, on Thursday at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington, and on Friday and Saturday at Floydfest in Floyd, Va.; deertickmusic.com. -
Listen. Listen harder. That’s what the British playwright Howard Barker needs you to do during “Gary the Thief” and “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred,” his two short, dense plays produced by the Potomac Theater Project/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2.
Theater is elastic, he reminds us, and proceeds to stretch our definitions of it. Mr. Barker, also a poet, describes his work as a Theater of Catastrophe in which, as it says in the program, “no attempt is made to satisfy any demand for clarity or the deceptive simplicity of a single message.”
Indeed. These two pieces, written as poems and delivered as monologues, come at you in a rush and can be fragmentary and elusive. Don’t be surprised if you miss things. But also don’t be surprised if Mr. Barker’s blunt lyricism lingers in your mind.
“I hate the weak/And whimper in the presence/Of the strong,” says Gary the Thief. A working-class hoodlum, Gary kills a baby, goes to prison (with its “dirty glamour attaching to/Insane and paltry acts”) and is courted by powerful people. At the end — impossibility of spoiler alert — the “cold has riddled his youth/And the ice has quarried his teeth,” but he sets off to be a prophet.
Plot, obviously, doesn’t make “Gary the Thief” run. (Good thing: chunks of it passed me right by.) The poetry — slippery and impressionistic — does, and the play, receiving its world premiere in this production, directed by Richard Romagnoli, is lucky to have the actor Robert Emmet Lunney to deliver it.
Mr. Lunney makes visceral what might have been abstract. He varies the colors of his voice and his accent: he can be prim, even schoolmarmish when he narrates, but as Gary the Thief he has a Cockney swagger and impacted rage. Gary’s stare is ferocious. (Reader, he scared me.)
Mr. Lunney, in a dark suit, performs on a bare black set with only a hint of theatrical artifice: a wry proscenium arch near the back of the stage. It’s all very spare and tasteful — he seems like a pearl nestled in a velvet jewel case — but it creates a respectful hush that tames the play.
Still, Mr. Lunney carries the day, making “Gary” the more dramatically satisfying of the two pieces on this 50-minute program. In “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred,” receiving its New York premiere, Mr. Romagnoli also keeps the stage bare, save for a few chairs. But here he has a conceit, which might be trite if it were more insistent.
For this monologue about war and the nasty things civilians do, the actor, Alex Draper, wears a tux and brandishes a highball glass. He surveys and anatomizes the wreckage of battle as if pointing out the vomit after a drunken party.
Plevna was the site of a siege in 1877 in the Russo-Turkish war. Not that Mr. Barker tells you that and not that he means his play, with its shifting perspectives, to be restricted to one historical event.
Mr. Draper, though, doesn’t have Mr. Lunney’s range, and his slow build to anger seems a bit mechanical. Squint, and he’s just a guy reciting poetry onstage. But that poetry compels. Passages stick: “Who was drowned by the snow/Which rose to the mouth of the sleeping sentry/The thaw will show.”
“Gary the Thief” and “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred” continue through July 31 at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street, Chelsea; (212) 279-4200, ticketcentral.com. -
With the possible exception of his invention of the orgasmatron, Woody Allen is not necessarily known as an early adopter of cutting-edge technology. Still, Mr. Allen has taken a bold leap into the 21st century and recorded audiobook editions of the four collections of humorous essays he published from 1971 to 2007, the digital agency ClearMetrics said on Tuesday.
Mr. Allen’s readings of his anthologies “Getting Even,” “Without Feathers,” “Mere Anarchy” and “Side Effects” — including his short story “The Kugelmass Episode” — can be purchased from Audible.com and iTunes; ClearMetrics also said that it had created a Web site for Mr. Allen at woodyallen.com, having wrested the domain name from two Icelandic college students.
From the set of his coming film “Midnight in Paris,” Mr. Allen answered a few questions by e-mail about his digital upgrade and the fate of one of his best-known literary creations.
Q. How were you persuaded to embrace the audiobook format? Do you own or regularly use any of the high-tech gadgets that play these files?
A. I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and would not live much longer. I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one, don’t own a word processor, and have zero interest in technology. Many people thought it would be a nice idea for me to read my stories, and I gave in.
Q. What was the recording experience like for you? Did you make any new discoveries about these pieces in rereading them? Did it take you back to the frame of mind you were in when you first wrote them?
A. I imagined it would be quite easy for me, and, in fact, it turned out to be monstrously hard. I hated every second of it, regretted that I had agreed to it, and after reading one or two stories each day, found myself exhausted. The discovery I made was that any number of stories are really meant to work, and only work, in the mind’s ear and hearing them out loud diminishes their effectiveness. Some of course hold up amusingly, but it’s no fun hearing a story that’s really meant to be read, which brings me to your next question, and that is that there is no substitute for reading, and there never will be. Hearing something aloud is its own experience, but it’s hard to beat sitting in bed or in a comfortable chair turning the pages of a book, putting it down, and eagerly awaiting the chance to get back to it.
Q. Are you of the opinion that the printed word is dying out? Will your conversion — literally and figuratively — to digital audiobooks lend credence to these depressing forecasts?
A. I can only hope that reading out loud does not contribute to the demise of literature, which I don’t think will ever happen. When I grew up, one could always hear T. S. Eliot, Yeats, S. J. Perelman and a host of others read on the Caedmon label, and it was its own little treat that in no way encroached on the pleasure of reading these people.
Q. Did Kugelmass ever escape from that irregular Spanish verb?
A. As far as Kugelmass goes, he’s being chased by the same obnoxious verbs that still chase me.
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