STREAMING THEATER
Boxed In
Zoom two-hander goes straight to the heart of art and love
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
For theater artists, these are desperate
times. Last week, the Broadway League
announced that Broadway alone was
losing $35 million each week with projected
losses of $1.5 billion — that’s if theaters
are able to open in January of 2021. The offi cial
announcement of a shutdown through Labor
Day will almost surely be extended until the
end of the year, if not the spring of 2021.
That’s just Broadway. Countless arts organizations,
and non-profi ts especially, may never
recover from the pandemic, and as we learn
more about how the deadly virus is spread it’s
unlikely people will return to sitting cheek-byjowl
with other audience members until such
time as there’s a reliable vaccine.
Desperation breeds creativity, and many artists
have taken to Zoom to keep the form alive,
though watching alone on a computer screen
is only the faintest facsimile of being in a theater.
Some efforts like Richard Nelson’s “What
Do We Need to Talk About,” which was specifi -
cally written for Zoom and has been extended
STREAMING CINEMA
Never Too Late For Reinvention
Willem Dafoe stands in for 67-year-old director Abel Ferrara
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Abel Ferrara made “Tommaso” at 67.
That’s a bit old for a fi lm about second
chances and starting over, inspired
by his own life and the experiences
of Willem Dafoe (who plays its title character).
But in recent years, the Italian-American director
has reversed his forefathers’ journey, moving
from New York to Rome. (He’s made documentaries
about life in Naples and Rome.) In
this fi lm’s opening scene, Tommaso attends an
Italian-language class, determined not to be an
Ugly American.
“Tommaso” is a paradox: full of anxiety about
the diffi culties of marriage yet relaxed and
shaggy. Content to run a leisurely two hours, it
feels as though it were invented scene by scene.
Ferrara has spent the fi ve years between it and
his previous narrative fi lm, “Pasolini,” making
documentaries, and although “Tommaso” is
quite ambitious, it feels caught on the fl y. Ferrara
shot it in his real house, with his actual
Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood in Carolyn Gage’s one-act piece
“Female Nude Seated,” directed by Emma Rosa Went, now
streaming on YouTube.
till June 28, succeed in this form. Having spent
many isolated evenings checking out offerings,
those that don’t work can make one miss live
theater even more. Even excellent fi lmed productions
lack the visceral connection of live
performance, but this is our current reality.
When a piece succeeds in this format, however,
it’s a cause for celebration, and Carolyn
Gage’s one-act piece “Female Nude Seated,”
decidedly deserves celebration. This short but
wife and daughter playing Tommaso’s. Yet it
also feels connected to “Pasolini,” in which Dafoe
played the gay director Pier Paolo Pasolini
on the day of his murder in 1975. Both weave
together a fi lmmaker’s daily life with his plans
for future movies.
Tommaso lives in Rome with his wife Nikki
(Christina Chiriac) and their toddler Dee Dee
(Anna Ferrara.) He is planning an ambitious
fi lm set in Russia, so he looks over its storyboards
and watches vides of bears attacking
men. (This is an allusion to Ferrara’s real-life
project “Siberia.”) Attending 12-step groups
constantly, he stays sober, warning a homeless
Pakistani man that alcohol is poison. But his
relationship with Nikki begins fraying. He may
be able to successfully refrain from using alcohol
and drugs, but he can’t connect to marriage
and family life, and his attempts to stay on the
straight and narrow lead to violent and sexually
driven fantasies
“Tommaso” is far from Ferrara’s fi rst time
playing with a narrative and characters based
emotionally rich piece tells the story of the
meeting of artists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone
in art school in London just after World War I.
Frustrated art students in a fi eld dominated by
men, they meet when Evie bursts in on Mainie
as Mainie, in an act of despair, is about to drink
a cup of turpentine. Evie intervenes, and the
two women end up drinking brandy instead
and talking. As they cover topics from the challenges
to women in the arts, predatory men,
what it takes to succeed, and the drive to paint
with passion and originality, they move slowly
and tentatively, yet unmistakably, toward a
deeper spiritual and physical intimacy.
There is a great deal packed into the piece.
There is the class difference between the patrician
Mainie, “the most popular girl in school,”
and the working class Evie. There is the confl
ict with their male art teacher, Walter Sickert,
a real-life character, pioneer of the avant-garde
after the war and linked by rumor to Jack the
Ripper. There is discussion of how to express
oneself originally as both a woman and an art-
➤ FEMALE NUDE SEATED , continued on p.31
on his own life. His 1993 “Dangerous Game”
cast Harvey Keitel and his then-wife Nancy
Ferrara in a story about a director’s tormented
life. He didn’t exactly hide his addiction; more
or less explicitly, most of the fi lms he made in
the ‘90s allude to it. When he did fi nally get sober,
he cast Dafoe and his then-partner Shanyn
Leigh in “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” an apocalyptic
narrative where Dafoe rejects the idea that
he should use heroin one last time because life
on earth will end in the morning anyway.
The widescreen cinematography of “Tommaso”
is immediately striking. Handheld, it
aims for an uncomfortable intimacy with the
characters. It was obviously shot on a cheap DV
camera. The fi lm’s look is often hazy and pale,
but it’s suffused with light. A lot of work went
into simulating the texture of reality; “Tommaso”
suggests a certain nostalgia for the video
experimentation of the early 2000s.
Ferrara began making genre fi lms with 1979’s
➤ TOMMASO, continued on p.31
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