Liv Ullman

      A rumpled bed, brightly lit and placed stage right, seems to dominate the stage in Liv Ullman’s haunting production of  ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ now playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music .  It’s the place  where  the climatic confrontation between Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski takes place, and where at night — as Stella says — ‘things happen between a man and a woman that make everything else seem unimportant.’   Desire — for sex and Desire  for life — infuse this production that stars Cate Blanchett, in a heartrending performance as Blanche.
    “I think we need Tennessee Williams now more than ever,” Ullman said during a recent interview at the Harvey Theatre, where the play will run until Dec, 20. “In a twitter world – we need his poetry.”
      “The way I see it,” Ullman wrote in the accompanying program. “Tennessee Williams wished to pull us out of our own angry darkness, by allowing us to see, to recognize the hurt and vulnerability and the fear disguised as violence or rudeness or carelessness or what may look like madness.”
     At the end of the play, Blanche moves off to stage right, bathed in light.
    Ullman said she may not be doomed – but has embraced her own solitude, accepted the untenability of her situation… “Maybe now she will be alone., Ullman said.  “Sometimes being alone is what a person may need.”

Orson Welles, 1937

    In 1937, a mad  genius stood poised, ready to unleash his vision on the world. The Crazy Genius was Orson Welles — and his production of  Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’  at his newly created Mercury Theatre in New York City would bring him infamy and opportunity.  Filmmaker Richard Linklater brings the period — and the genius  to life in his new film ‘‘Me and Orson Welles.’
    Based on the coming -of -age novel by Robert Kaplow,  Linklater  shows us all the fun, craziness, treachery and heartbreak that came under the rubric: A Life in the Theatre  — especially if it involved the Boy Wonder who was Orson Welles in 1937.
      We get the backstage intrigue, the romances and Welles as a kind of sometimes benign, sometimes cruel dictator/director. He wanted results and adoration — didn’t hesitate to cut anyone who didn’t give him enough of either.  British actor Christian McCay, who stars as Welles, nails the director’s brilliance — as well as his ability to manipulate and seduce.
       Zac Efron is touchingly vulnerable as Richard Samuels,  the high school kid who stumbles on a rehearsal at the Mercury and gets a small part in the production.  At the end, after Samuels has tasted some success, some betrayal, and some joy, he tells his friend, Gretta, who has dreams of being a writer: “It feels like we have everything before us…..” The camera pulls back in a gesture of joy and acknowledgement.   That everything would eventually come to mean World War  II — and for Welles — more masterpieces, fame, financial ruin — and a haunting memory of a sled called Rosebud.  But in that moment, for those characters — the world was alive  — with possibility and with hope. 

William Blake

         Along with her husband and artistic collaborator Christo, she helped wrap the Pont Neuf  in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin;  swathed the Biscayne Bay Islands near Miami in a luscious  Pink,  and in 2005, she filled  Central Park with 7,503 Saffron Colored Gates .  Those gates transformed a barren winter landscape into something amazing and alive and created a new relationship to a  familiar terrain. 
      French artist Jeanne-Claude – of the  vibrant red hair and even redder lips  – didn’t mind,  she once said, in an interview, that the monumental projects that she and Christo devoted themselves and that took years to complete and cost millions —  were just transient – ephemeral works.  What it was all about – she said – was creating joy.  Their works expressed “the quality of love and tenderness that we human beings have for what does not last.”
       Jeanne-Claude died this week, at the age of 74.

Series I - No. I, 1918

    Before she became known as Georgia O’Keefe, the iconic painter of blisteringly sensual flower paintings and stark landscapes, she was just a young woman coming to New York from Wisconsin with dreams of being an artist.  She wanted to free herself  from inhibition — .to express all the feelings and seemingly inexpressible thoughts that were roiling inside of her. She studied art at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College under Arthur Dow,  a specialist in Oriental art who taught that it was the artist’s personality that should come through a drawing, not just a realistic rendering of a subject.
    In 1915, she emerged onto the New York Art World’s stage with a group of abstract charcoal works, whose purpose, she said in interviews later, were to translate into art what she couldn’t say in words – that it was through imagery and shapes that her thoughts would coalesce.
       From there, she moved onto color, moving gradually from intense cobalt blues to hot pinks and lavenders – blossoming into the forms and flowers for which she later became known.
       The Whitney is showing all these works – some not seen  in New York since her first shows – along with some revelatory photographs taken of her by her lover and mentor, Edward Steichen. 
      Georgia O’Keefe: Abstraction is running till January 17.   Don’t Miss It!

The Milkmaid

       Noone knows exactly who she was now.  A woman ensconced in domesticity, pouring milk — the scene may have  seemed mundane.  But the Dutch  painter Johannes Vermeer saw something majestic and sensual — even monumental in the moment.  The colors seem translucent.  The level of detail makes it seem almost photographic, although it was likely painted sometime during the year  1657- 58.  The painting possesses a moving luminosity.  Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Nov. 28,  ”The Milkmaid”  is considered the painter’s masterpiece.  She was sent over this year — along with other paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries as a gift from the Netherlands to pay homage to the 400th anniversary of explorer Henry Hudson’s visit to the island, we now know as Manhattan.
       To see more of the Dutch influence, check out the exhibit at the South Street Seaport,  “New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World.”  And through June, 2010, The Holland on the Hudson festival will celebrate the 400th anniversary with events and exhibitions.

  Finding Magic

        Binoche, who has had a spectacular career, working with directors as varied as Kieslowski, Godard,  never thought about being a dancer. But at age 43, after answering her masseuse’s question: Do you Want to Dance? — she embarked on this project.
      But stretching boundaries is what she is all about.
      In an interview with writer  Faith Salie for  Double X,  she said she tries to stay away from labels. “I  try not to call myself [anything], because otherwise you get stuck into ideas.  Getting into other fields, worlds—it gives me certain freedom, and at the same time it shows me my limits, my pain.
       ”We have a tendency because of fear or of a lack of imagination to be out of tune with the truthful, magical side [of our bodies,” she told Salie.  And I have to say that if I didn’t get through that experience, I wouldn’t have discovered my energy—what the Chinese people call qi, you know the tai chi, the qi gong. I would say it is a sign of what the body has, which is the energy that you can’t see but you can feel.”
Finding Dreams
       Fearless  would be one word that would describe her.
       She posed naked for Playboy at the age of 43 and  while she doesn’t think she will keep dancing, she told Double X, she hs been transformed by having had the experience.  ” Dancing taught me to go for my dreams. And not to judge my dreams from outside, just to do it.”
    “In-I” will run through Sept. 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is paired with a retrospective of her films at BAMCinematek: “Rendez-Vous With Juliette Binoche” through Sept. 30. Her paintings will be on display at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy at 972 5th Avenue through Oct. 9.