Starting today, the Abrons Art Center is hosting a ten-day long festival of contemporary performance called American Realness. Combining many different aspects of experimental performance art including dance, traditional theater, drag shows and concerts, the festival has over 46 performances of 20 productions. There is also a bookstore and a pop-up cafe to provide respite for those hunkering down for the daily marathon of performance art.

Although all of the artists look like they will prove to be amazing, especially on my radar is The Heather Lang Show by Eleanor Bauer and Vice Versa, which is being billed as a “double one-woman show,” that somehow incorporates QVC, spirituality and drag. Did I mention there is voguing? I am imagining stand up comedy meets Paris is Burning meets Jerry Springer. Let me explain, Heather Lang, by trade is a professional dancer working in tons of the top Broadway shows, who also happens to be one of funniest people I have ever met. She is super pretty but isn’t afraid to get ugly and pour milk on her face to make you laugh. I’ve seen her do this. The press release says to expect talk shows, critiques on cultural identity and of course, drag. I’d put my money on this being a pretty awesome and entertaining show.

Performances are January 5 at 10pm, January 8 at 6pm, January 11 at 11pm and January 15 at 9pm at The Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater, 466 Grand Street, NYC. Tickets are available here.

burn·ing adjective 1. aflame; on fire. 2. intense; passionate: a burning desire. noun the state, process, sensation, or effect of being on fire, burned, or subjected to intense heat.

Both the characters and the actors in Thomas Bradshaw’s newest, and most nuanced play to date, Burning, are aptly on fire. These people respond heatedly to their impulses, as creatures fleeing from buildings aflame.

The play tracks three seemingly disparate, and eventually inter-connected story lines, wherein a black artist, Peter, who has consciously obscured his race, ends up travelling to Berlin to appear in a gallery show run, in part, by a neo-Nazi rebel, Michael. Simultaneously depicted, a young wannabe actor named Chris is taken in by a gay New York theater couple and eventually becomes their houseboy/sexual plaything/son. The narratives eventually converge, bad behavior ensues.

Yes, there is graphic sex portrayed and titillating nudity – vividly exposing almost every primary character (which may be enough to bring you to the theater or not) – but unlike some other shock-value invested (and thereby predictable) work, the sexual content merely supports the theme of human destruction and regeneration that is woven throughout the piece. Case in point, the eloquent “destroy and re-build” speech, sincerely imparted by the character of Peter (the aforementioned black artist, married to a devoted and pregnant – and white – Josephine, and elegantly played by Stephen Tyrone Williams). Here Peter marvels at his and others’ human fallibility, and finds true beauty in his own frailty. All this is sincerely realized while his cock still resides in a Sudanese hooker’s ass.

Fittingly, the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) is invoked repeatedly, interestingly by the four gay characters in the play, but relevant to each of the three story lines.

Can such impulses be natural? Does nature recommend what offends her? The question of acting on human desire versus remaining within what is, perhaps, a synthetic social construct burns through the undercurrent of the piece. Where does reasonably living one’s truth reside?

Thomas Bradshaw has built a career on shocking his audiences. A downtown provocateur, whose plays have earned him many distinctions including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), academic positions (Northwestern) and international productions (playwright in residence, The Soho Theater in London, et al), Bradshaw has never been produced for such an “uptown” New York audience as The New Group’s, until now.

The playwright includes some autobiographical conflicts, such as when the seasoned actor Jack (shrewdly drawn by the great Andrew Garman) argues that what works for a downtown house can’t be transported so easily to an uptown crowd.

Furthermore, young Chris (Evan Johnson) exclaiming, in his adulatory propositioning of the older playwright Donald (Adam Trese):“This idea that people can’t relate to certain types of material is bullshit.” These words appear to stand for Bradshaw’s direct theater philosophy, and this writer is in agreement.

Secondary characters and principals alike are confronted with, and generally succumb to, consuming desire for that which they cannot have, or feel they should not have. From Heinz the bone-headed neo-Nazi to Peter the ebony anal-craver to Donald the HIV positive playwright, untoward impulses acted upon lead to the sweetest of release. And while sexual release is most overtly explored in the play, and is frequently presented with the experience of getting closer to God, the release in violence and death brings upon these same sublime comparisons.

The irony of finding God in our darkest of human foibles rings true. Go see this play for its mind and its body. A philosophical quandary wrapped in an ass-eating, finger licking, sister-diddling provocation. Alive with heat indeed.

Burning by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Scott Elliott, produced by the New Group is running through December 17 at the New Group at Theater Row, Acorn Theater, 410 West 42 St., NYC. Tickets can be purchased by calling (212) 239-6200 or through Telecharge. Running time is 2 hours 45 minutes.

Performa, the visual art performance biennial, is descending upon the city for the first three weeks of November. In its fourth and ever growing iteration, the biennial’s diverse schedule traverses theatre, poetry, comedy, film and music, and includes truly innovative performances. Many are even free while others require an RSVP, and others, paid tickets. Our not-to-be-missed events include:

Shirin Neshat, who will be debuting the live-performance piece OverRuled. Set in a courtroom, the piece examines different types of dictatorship and theocracy within the context of the Iranian and Arab uprisings. Famed Iranian musician Mohsen Manjoo and Iranian actor Mohammad B. Ghaffari will be featured.

Taking place at the SVA theatre will be Liz Magic Laser’s I Feel Your Pain. Combining acting and cinema, she explores and deconstructs the paradigm of the American political contest as a romantic drama.

If you’re familiar with Mika Rottenberg’s work, then you’ve experienced the bizarre world she creates using physical labor to produce biproducts that have the power to transform or catapult these worlds into action. For her collaboration with Jon Kessler, the piece Seven will incorporate a “chakra juicer” that will collect the body fluids of seven New York performers, which will then be magically, using Mika’s internal logic, transformed into a “fantastical celebration” on the African savannah.

Tarek Atoui’s Visiting Tarab could turn into one of those amazing events that make you feel like you’re in on a secret and everyone else there is too. Using the largest collection of classical Arab music, he invited 16 diverse musicians to Beirut to explore the compilation. The live performance during the biennial will be collective and continuous, built of sound and music with artists such as Zenna Parkins, Anti-Pop Consortium, Uriel Barthelemi, John Butcher and DJ Spooky, who will be there working towards a state of tareb, or emotional evocations.

Skateboarding and public sculpture come together for Raphael Zarka’s two-part project: the first being a public lecture on his recent research into the geometry of skateboarding, and the second, a creation of a cycloid skateboard ramp inspired by Galileo.

Comedy also has a large currency in the festival and Performa Ha! will take place each Sunday, featuring artists, stand-up comedians and musicians taking a crack at conceptual art and stand-up. Reggie Watts, Hennesey Youngman, Club Nutz (Tyson and Scott Reeder), Dina Seiden, and Michael Smith are confirmed for the stage. Additionally, Performa’s film program focuses on comedy by screening Richard Pryor’s groundbreaking comedy concert film, Lenny Bruce’s second-to-last performance, and Comics on the Edge in the 1970s features Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman.

In Athi-Patra Ruga’s piece Ilulwane, the artist reflects on New York City, his own Xhosa culture and photographs by Alvin Baltrop in form of synchronized swimming. And as the master of ceremonies, Irvin Morazan will don his Master Blaster headdress and lead singles in four rounds of The Dating Game at El Museum Del Barrio. Performa truly has it all.

Tonight, brave the snow and see a special performance of an original operetta written by Alec Coiro, starring Alexandra Butler, Erica Randlett, Gordon Hull and Nick Kramer, and produced by our friend Erin Krause. Set in Victorian England, the musical follows the manful Lord Alec as he chooses which of two blushing maidens he will make his betrothed bride.

Upon My Word will start at 8pm on Wednesday, January 26 at The Arclight Theatre, 152 West 71st St , NY. Tickets are $10 online and are available here.

Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer in the second installment of the Iron Man franchise.

Ten years on from his show-stopping performance as a moonwalking maniac in the original Charlie’s Angels movie Sam Rockwell returns to his roots with two familiar roles–one evil and the other innocent–strikingly similar to those that made him a star. In next month’s Iron Man 2—playing what he calls “a cousin” to his Charlie’s hooligan—he again turns in a hot ember of stylized villainy in a blockbuster franchise, while presently he treads the Broadway boards as a simpleton hotel employee in Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane at The Schoenfeld Theatre. These are signature pieces, both of them, which fit snuggly into the Rockwell oeuvre if you will, and, according to him, make up the meat of his métier. “I think that I have made a reputation playing baddies,” he says. “But, also nymphs, you know, kinda innocents—characters that were really childlike.” He mentions a few of his movies that are in accord with this template, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Safe Men, to which we could also add Welcome to Collinwood (innocent), Galaxy Quest (innocent), and certainly The Assassination of Jesse James (innocent again). “But then there is The Green Mile,” he says, of the Stephen King-penned tale set in a death row prison, and his crazed convict character ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton, “he’s more of a rascal.”

Understatement notwithstanding, that brings us to the next tier of Rockwell’s career—the outlaw eccentric—something he first authored in The Green Mile, but which, in 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, as Chuck Barris’s (perhaps) fantasy self, rocketed him into a new echelon of film actor. Somewhere during the filming of that movie, under the direction of George Clooney on a highly touted Charlie Kaufman script, Sam Rockwell became a movie star. Witness the gritty, tough independent movies Choke and Moon he made subsequently. Even for all their heavy material and sensitive subject matter, they are patently star vehicles, albeit short of iron men or anything transforming. “I don’t really know what a movie star is any more,” he says, in casual protest. “I think a movie star is someone who is financially viable, so I guess I’m an independent film movie star, not a Tom Cruise movie star.” If by this he means not cartwheeling on sofas and mucking up the tabloids, we have to agree and confoundedly hand it to him. Yes, even though he dates a beautiful young actress (Leslie Bibb) the man keeps a low-ass profile. He’s not at the Laker games with Leo or even highballing with Clooney on page six and that goes a long way toward creating leeway for his on-screen mutability. But, if he means he’s not redlining it as hard as Maverick in every scene, we beg to differ. There is paint blistering in the background when he’s doing his thing and, clearly, when studio heads hire him now for a gig, they are buying in for the Rockwell brand. They want the searing Sam or the silly Sam. They want the baddie or the innocent and, let’s be honest, we do too. We wanna see Sammy dance.

But, he goes on, “I think of Phil Hoffman as a movie star—he’s amazing, he’s got an Oscar, you know?” Like Hoffman, Rockwell has that rare talent of so possessing a character you cannot even fathom another actor in the role. How does he do it? “I think there’s probably 30 actors who couldda played the part, you know, or maybe five, you never know. Everybody’s got some weird thing that they do—Chris Walken or Chris Cooper, or Phil. Everybody’s got some sorta stamp they put on it.” Whether it is an actor’s superstition or willful naiveté, Rockwell claims to have no grasp on his own ‘stamp,’ but offers to venture a guess. “I like to go for it, you know. I don’t like to pussyfoot around, don’t like to half-step, so to speak. Maybe that’s my MO.”

Actor/director Clark Gregg, when explaining why he chose Rockwell to play the sex addict with a god complex in his adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, said that he had been so spellbound by a performance Rockwell gave in a play he couldn’t take his eyes off him—even though he too was in the show. Gregg cited Rockwell’s fearlessness and willingness to go all in and never repeat himself as reasons he cast him but Rockwell is quick to shirk the compliments. “I don’t know about that; I repeat myself a lot of the time,” he says, guiltily.

Rockwell’s fearlessness is displayed nowhere better than in Moon, a sci-fi mind-bender in which he is the only actor on screen the entire movie. What he describes as, “both a nightmare and a dream for an actor,” may be his most underappreciated performance to date. Rockwell plays several different manifestations of himself and, without giving anything away, breaks your heart, makes you laugh, and makes you shake your head in astonishment. “Yeah. Yeah, that was a blast,” he says, of the grassroots on-line Oscar campaign for his performance, which, though he doesn’t have a computer, he was made aware of.

So now, ten years in as a top-flight star, with at least one performance (Confessions) criminally neglected by Oscar behind him, what does Rockwell feel he’s missing? “There’s all kinds of stuff. I just did a reading of Streetcar Named Desire. That’s a part I’d love to play. I’d love to play Hamlet. I’d also like to play Darth Vader and Han Solo but those parts have already been taken.”

But in the meantime he’s keeping a cool head. “I’d just like to play some juicy parts. I bought an apartment for my mother last year. I have a mortgage on a beautiful loft. I’d like to buy an apartment for my Dad. I’d like to do more theatre, more often. The last play I did was seven years ago. Even if it’s in like Cleveland I’d like to do theatre more often in conjunction with films. But that’s really it. I don’t really have a goal—I just wanna keep working and changing and growing as an artist and trying to become a better actor and stuff like that.”

Wherever it takes him, we’ll be watching.

Rockwell with co-star Christopher Walken in A Behanding in Spokane at the Shoenfeld in New York.

Photo by Paula Court

Clearly contemporary art can have anything as its subject matter and can execute it in any form. “Big Eater” does just that, situating a performance piece on David Hasselhoff’s demoralizing video, taped by his young daughter, in which he’s eating a hamburger on the ground completely wasted. Through the device of appropriation choreographer David Neumann makes everything suspect: his dancers’ moves suddenly disintegrate like they’ve stopped believing in them when sections of classical music fade into NatGeo style “tribal” rhythms; we witness again the Hasselhoff moment and listen to juxtaposed TV dialog from crime shows. Appropriation demands that the viewer ask what is real and by using this device Neumann created a space for the topics of death, nature, philosophy, and reality to become something both playful and sobering.

The Kitchen presents Big Eater by David Neumann March 4-13th.

Trifles, a 1916 one-act play by Susan Glaspell set at the scene of a bizarre murder in the Midwest in 1900, is being staged by Theater of the Two-headed Calf at St. Mark’s Church. Trifles director Brooke O’Harra and Composer Brendan Connelly team up with the new music ensemble Yarn/Wire to approach Glaspell’s text as part concert, part play, and part meditation on crime, empathy and sisterhood. The costumes were designed by Kirby Mages (a former Dossier intern) and Michael DeAngelis. There are only twelve performances, so get tickets here.

Sam Mendes by Brigitte Lacomb

Oscar and Tony winner Sam Mendes has arrived in Brooklyn with a pair of plays by the grand old bard as part of the second annual Bridge Project, a cross-Atlantic production between The West End’s Old Vic Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (his street team seems to have arrived well in advance with a gagillion slick one-sheets–featuring high contrast black and white close-up photos of the cast members–which now paper much of Manhattan as well as our local shire).  Running out in front on the boards at The Harvey Theatre is the cross-dressing cluster-truffle As You Like It, which opened January 12th, soon to be joined in double-barrel repertory by the Sturm and Drang of The Tempest.

As artistic director of the Bridge Project Mendes has selected the pieces in the pairing, he states in his manifesto, “as a single gesture, a single journey.”  He cites Ted Hughes, highlighting the recurring trope of exile, as well as finding an analogy between the wilds of the forest of Arden in the the light comedy with Devil’s Island in the later, Mediterranean-set melodrama.  And the director would also gather our attention to the journeying forth, the romantic questing, begun by the young lovers in As You Like It and left open ended by the melancholy Jaques wandering off at the end of that play–and presumably, we are to infer, brought to conclusion by Prospero’s clemency to conclude The Tempest.  This underscoring is as salient as it is deft, for the player inhabiting the two wanderer rôles, Jaques and Prospero, is the marvelous Stephen Dillane, and any director is wise to place such attention on the shiniest gem in his menagerie.

By far the biggest laughs in As You Like It come in response to Dillane’s droll Jaques.  His lassitude has a great deal more energy than many of the other performers’ zeal and the scenes he merely slinks through pop brighter than do those–even highly kinetic ones–in his absence.  Jaques gets the famous all-the-world-is-a-stage speech and not all the world’s players are created equal.  While all the musical elements are nicely arranged it is a Bob Dylan impersonation by Dillane, complete with harmonica, that positively brings the house down.

But As You Like It is a suit hung on the shoulders of young Rosalind, the exiled Duke’s daughter, also exiled herself, who in true romantic-comedy fashion resorts to cross-dressing and then must woo the man she falls for at first glance (“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”) with words, not, you know, charms.  Juliet Rylance’s gender-bending performance is energetic and committed and some of the half American, half British cast comes to her aid, but so much of the meta-ness and irony of the play (in Shakespeare’s time all the players were men and thus Rosalind is a man playing a woman playing a man… etcetera) is shrugged off today.  In fact the text itself would never pass a logic test from some script-doctor in a back room at Warner Brothers nowadays (why must Rosalind continue the charade when she finds her love Orlando in the netherworld of Arden, for starters).  Though, why so serious.  One imagines that Shakespeare himself–like Graham Greene, who called his lighter fare ‘entertainments’–didn’t count this one as all that heady.

And when there isn’t much for savoring with the mind, aim for the eyes.  Here is where Mendes–as in his films American Beauty and Road to Perdition–really shines.  Tom Piper’s sets are lean and as elegantly rustic as a BDDW catalog.  The lighting by Paul Bryant is nicely textural and expressive and the cast look like a bunch of chic Rang & Bone Robins of the Hood in Catherine Zuber’s modern winter costumes.  Within the wonderful peeling bohemia of The Harvey Theatre all the visual elements combine to make a sumptuous world that feels… well, a little like a garden party in Brooklyn.

As for the rest, like as much of it as please you.

As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Mendes, BAM Harvey Theatre, through March 13.  bam.org

The Public Theatre’s presentation of “John Cassavetes’ Husbands,” running as part of the Under the Radar festival, is a nearly verbatim, unabridged reproduction of a largely improvised movie.  Whatever the late great auteur’s feeling about the ‘I’-word (busily qualifying it with hours of workshopping and rehearsals, I imagine), the rhythms of his 1970 film, starring chums Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara along with himself, were tailored to the actors’ specific traits, talents, physicality and the natural chemistry (as well as, one imagines, sometime antipathy) between them.  Hang those same made-to-measure roles and lines on any other three—especially much younger—men and the fine craftsmanship of a middle-aged-boys-gone-wild story disappears in billowing excess.

For the richness of Cassavetes’s work came in his luxuriating in the squirrelly, raw moments blooming forth long after any sane director would have called “cut” — he not only threw broken, wounded people against one another at high velocity, he showed them flapping about, ever more broken, in the aftermath of the collision.  All of which demands performances and commitment from a cast not often found, well, anywhere.

That being said, the actors in director Doris Mirescu’s incarnation are all in.  In fact the moments of real electricity come, much as they do in the film, from Gus’s ferocious tenacity—to please, to terrify, to entertain.  Though in the movie these moments are the fruit of Cassavetes’s own charisma, in the play they come via actor Florin Penisoara’s ferocious approximation of Cassavetes.

Indeed the play wants so badly to be its source material, much of it is actually shot on camera and projected on a screen behind the set.  For at least a quarter of the three-hour run time the action is taking place outside the theatre with handheld cameras dogging the actors—down Lafayette, in and out of a cab, up and down back stairwells.  But, while it seems ridiculous to talk about self-awareness in the theatre, the actors stranded on stage watching the “multi-media adaptation” along with the audience make one yearn for the clean, uncooked presentation of Cassavetes’s original.  Because even if “Husbands” wasn’t the brutalist masterpiece of cinema’s ultimate sashimi chef (“Love Streams,” coincidentally, adapted from Cassavetes’s play, may take that honor),  its signature was so exact, so precise as to make any rough estimate feel irrelevant.

But still we reach the end, the bender done, the boys come home, and we must wonder what it was all about.  Loneliness?  Fear of death?

And we wonder how the creator of this film never stopped smiling.

“John Cassavetes’ Husbands” @ The Public Theatre through January 17th. 180 minutes with intermission. Dangerous Ground Productions. Conceived, Designed and Directed by Doris Mirescu. $15 tickets at publictheater.org or 212-967-7555 The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street