(718) 260–2500 Brooklyn Paper’s essential guide to the Borough of Kings November 1–7, 2019
THEATER
Weird sisters
Something twisted this way comes!
A gender-swapped production of Shakespeare’s
“Macbeth” will descend on Williamsburg’s
Brick theater starting on Nov. 8, taking
the 15th-century play into a post-apocalyptic
future of disordered power structures and uncertain
gender roles.
“Unsex Me Here: The Tragedy of Macbeth”
— which takes its name from Lady Macbeth’s
famous line, wishing for the murderous ambition
of a man — has cast female and nonbinary
actors in male roles, and male actors as women,
although each actor’s costume will match their
real-life identity. The gender swap helps viewers
meet the characters without gendered expectations,
said the director
“One of the things it does is it frees you from
all the cliches that this play usually comes with,”
said Maggie Cino. For instance, audiences often
expect a heightened sexuality from Lady Macbeth,
said Cino, but in this play “we’ve been able
to get into her vulnerability and her pain.”
The cast features mostly cisgender and transgender
women and nonbinary actors, Cino said.
Only four characters will be played by cisgender
men: the three witches and Lady Macbeth
(pictured above, on left).
The production is set in a post-apocalyptic
future, in which survivors of climate crisis and
a global pandemic have reorganized society and
restructured gender roles, Cino said.
“We talked a lot about our invented backstory,”
she noted. “One of the things we decided
is that not a lot of the cis men survive, and the
people left have decided to take on different
gender pronouns.”
Cino found plenty in Shakespeare’s Scottish
play to support her dystopian vision, including
the show’s focus on rapid fair and foul weather
changes, reflecting our present-day struggles
with climate change.
“The play is obsessed with the weather,” she
said.
For Cino, giving a modern spin to the classic
tragedy allowed her to explore aspects of
the original text that resonate most with modern
viewers.
“I wanted to take those things that are already
in the play and explore them in a way that is relevant,”
she said.
“Unsex Me Here” at the Brick (579 Metropolitan
Ave. between Lorimer Street and Union
Avenue in Williamsburg, (718) 907–6189, www.
bricktheater.com). Nov. 8–23; Wed–Sat at 7 pm.
$20. — Rose Adams
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Check out the Brooklyn that might
have been!
A new book examines the alternative
and forgotten history of Kings County.
“Brooklyn: The Once and Future City”
explores several ambitious but never-built
projects proposed during the decades after
the vibrant city of Brooklyn was controversially
folded into New York City, according
to its author, who will read from
his book at the Brooklyn Historical Society
on Nov 7.
“What the Manhattan expansionists saw
in Brooklyn was this field of dreams and
there’s all sorts of fantasies about creating
this super city using Brooklyn’s unbuilt terrain,”
said Thomas Campanella.
In his book, the urban historian investigates
several projects the city tried to undertake
in the borough after the Great Mistake
of 1898, many of which were near
his home neighborhood of Marine Park.
The southern half of the borough has been
largely ignored by historians, according
to Campanella.
“If northern Brooklyn was in the shadow
of Manhattan, the southern half of Brooklyn
has been in the shadow of both,” he
said.
One such plan was to turn the shallow
waters of Jamaica Bay into a deepwater port,
following the water trade boom that followed
the digging of the Panama Canal.
“The hopes were there was going to be a
EXHIBIT
New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of Menus
jump up in seaborne trade and everyone was
trying to get ready for that,” he said.
City planners wanted to dredge and excavate
the shallow waters of the bay for
wharfs, and to build a railway station to
allow for heavy manufacturing, but then
Parks Commissioner and power-broker-inthe
making Robert Moses sank the idea
because he wanted to preserve the natural
wetlands.
Not far away, in what is now Marine Park,
planners wanted to pave the wetlands of
Gerritsen Inlet and use the space for a bicentennial
celebration of George Washington’s
birthday in 1932. That plan eventually
morphed into the World’s Fair, which Moses
again strong-armed the city into moving
to Flushing, Queens, in 1939.
Another spectacular project in Campanella’s
book is the Globe Tower, a 700-foot
steampunk-looking orb structure designed
to house an indoor amusement park in Coney
Island, dreamt up by early 20th century
inventor Samuel Friede.
Friede convinced the founder of the Steeplechase,
George Tilyou, to erect the steel
structure on Surf Avenue, near the current
location of MCU Park. Friede got people to
buy stocks in the project — and then took
off for Europe with the money. It is hard to
say now whether he planned to swindle his
investors all along, or if he just got in over
his head, according to Campanella.
“It’s hard to say whether Friede was planning
the scam all along or whether he actually
believed in it,” he said.
These grand ambitions were soon replaced
by an inferiority complex, said the
author, in which Brooklyn no longer felt
like an underdog competitor against its
Manhattan rival, but like a lesser part of
the larger city.
“What consolidation ultimately did, in
my view, in time it sucked the moxie and
ambition out of Brooklyn,” he said. “That’s
when I start to see evidence of this toxic
self-loathing in Brooklyn, ‘Woe is me, we’re
colonized terrain, we’re the outer borough,
we’re a lesser place’ — it’s a very different
Brooklyn from today.”
BOOKS
Reading picks
Word’s picks:
“Kill Creek,” by
Scott Thomas
Here is a final spooky
recommendation for
the Halloween season:
Scott Thomas’s debut
novel “Kill Creek.” This
book is a great haunted
house story with a twisted
sense of self. I really enjoyed
the slow build-up
to things going fully out of control.
— Will Olsen, Word 126 Franklin St. at Milton
Street in Greenpoint, (718) 383–0096, www.
wordbookstores.com .
Community
Bookstore’s pick:
“Eyes Bottle Dark
with a Mouthful of
Flowers,” by Jake
Skeets
Winner of the National
Poetry Series,
Jake Skeets’ debut collection
glitters like a fistful
of mineral earth. In
dizzying, de-centering
bursts of verse and prose, at once spare and
luminous, Skeets renders tangible the experience
of a young, queer member of the Diné Nation
in Gallup, New Mexico — also known as
“Drunk Town, USA,” and “The Indian Capital
of the World.”
— Samuel Partal, Community Bookstore 43
Seventh Ave. between Carroll Street and Garfield
Place in Park Slope, (718) 783–3075, www.
commu nityb ookst ore.net .
Greenlight
Bookstore’s pick:
“How We Fight to
Save Our Lives,” by
Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones’s memoir
of growing up gay and
black in the South is one
of the absolute best books
to come out this year. It
is raw, honest, and brave.
Growing up, he navigated
complex relationships (with his single mother,
his conservative and religious grandmother, his
classmates) as he came of age and came to terms
with his own sexuality and identity. In parts
tragic and heartbreaking, in others wildly, wickedly
funny, he shares his story with warmth,
wisdom, and grace.
— Rebecca Fitting, Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St. between S. Elliott Place and S.
Portland Avenue in Fort Greene, (718) 246–
0200, www.greenlightbookstore.com .
By Ben Verde
Brooklyn Paper
These cartoonists are drawing together!
Brooklyn’s biggest comic book
expo will return to Clinton Hill next
weekend. The 11th annual Comic Arts
Brooklyn festival, at Pratt Institute on
Nov. 2, will feature more than 300
cartoonists showing off their artwork,
mini-comics, and graphic novels.
And most importantly, said one
Bushwick comics creator, the fair
offers artists a chance to leave
their drawing tables and meet each
other.
“I love Comic Arts Brooklyn because
it’s very much built as a community,”
said cartoonist Abby Jame. “It’s
just artists being brought together.”
COMICS
Jame, whose pastel illustrations
often offer humorous takes on serious
issues faced by young women,
will sell her own books at the festival,
including the titles “Emotional
Data,” “High and Shy,” and “Lizard
Daddies.”
The artists sold her first comics
through Williamsburg’s independent
comic store Desert Island, which also
organizes the Comic Arts Brooklyn
festival.
Those initial sales, reported by store
owner Gabe Fowler, helped push her
to pursue art as a career.
“It gave me a bunch of confidence
right away when people started noticing
it and buying it,” she said. “He
would tell me when people bought it
and it was really exciting.”
In addition to scores of young artists
showing and selling their comics,
prints, art books, and rare merchandise,
the 2019 edition of the Brooklyn
comics fest will feature a full day
of panel discussions, opening with
a conversation between two of the
biggest scrawlers in the sequential
art field: Chris Ware, of the “Acme
Novelty Library” series, and Pulitzer
winner Art Spiegelman, the creator
of “Maus.”
The day after the art fair, Desert
Island will also host the “CABaret
Voltaire” variety show, featuring animated
cartoons, comedy, and puppet
shows by cartoonists. According to
Jame, organizing these kinds of reallife
events is one of the most important
aspects of the festival, since it
keeps artists from festering alone in
cyberspace.
“A lot of times things are online,
but they make an effort to get people
in real tangible spaces with each
other,” she said.
Forgotten
histories
Author examines the wonders
of a Brooklyn that never was
The once and future Kings County: (Above) Early 20th century inventor Samuel
Friede proposed building the 700-foot Globe Tower to house an indoor amusement
park in Coney Island. (Top left) City planners wanted to transform the shallow Jamaica
Bay into a deepwater port.
Collection of Thomas J. Campanella
“Built and Never-Built Brooklyn” at
Brooklyn Historical Society 128 Pierrepont
St. at Clinton Street in Brooklyn
Heights, (718) 222–4111, www.brooklynhistory.
org. Nov. 7 at 6:30 pm. $10.
Ink outside the box
Comic fest gets cartoonists out of the studio
Millennial pink: Bushwick artist Abby Jame will show off her images
of young women at the Comic Arts Brooklyn festival.
Abby Jame
Comic Arts Brooklyn Festival at
Pratt Institute’s Athletics and Recreation
building 395 DeKalb Ave.
between Hall Street and Classon
Avenue in Clinton Hill, (718) 288–
5087, www.comicartsbrooklyn.
com. Nov. 2; 11 am–7 pm. Free.
Caberet Voltaire variety show at
Market Hotel (1140 Myrtle Ave.
between Broadway and Ditmars
Street in Bushwick). Nov. 3; 2–7
pm. Free.
Kampfire Films PR
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