If There is an Arthouse Revival, I’m Happy to have Served

I also performed for famed acting teacher Alice Spivak in what would be her last production on stage.  Things were on a small roll.  Go back six years in your memory.  Has anything changed in that amount of time?  Likely.  It’s as if reality itself was tipped upside down and shook.  At the onset of 2020, I also auditioned for two films.  Each made its premiere only this month. 

Enough has been said about retiring to one’s couch or office chair with eyes pinned to an internet-driven screen -- the nasty mix of isolation and over-exposure; It’s a like a bad salad.  The once highly-anticipated movie night is akin to going to the gym these days.  You don’t feel like it, but once you’re there, you’re glad you went.  It’s certainly more compelling to dress up and head to Tribeca or Williamsburg to see a film when you’re performing in it.  But the treat was this:  Here are two very different pieces of independent filmmaking and each had a wonderful reception:  Hal Hartley’s Where to Land, which taps serious life questions with humor, sarcasm and a calm courage.  And Shackled, a science-fiction drama whose judicial system offers a second chance to select pairs of inmates, if they agree to a contract unlikely to be honored.

Classy bar scenes prefaced the viewings.  The Roxy Hotel’s Roxy Cinema and The Nitehawk Cinema share elements of the pre-multiplex time period.  These are intimate spaces, and we were like the first small breaths of a society freeing itself from the smog of division that permeates the air today.

We witnessed the enduring nature of collaboration and reception.  We recalled there is a finer bonding agent in socializing (particularly at after-parties).  Maybe even little invisibles whose energy intermingles with others’.