While we were in New York City last month, PJ and I saw Shame directed by Steve McQueen and starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. Fassbender plays Brandon, a high-functioning sex addict who’s delicately balanced world is thrown off keel when his sister, played by Mulligan, comes for an unexpected visit. Here’s the trailer:
Shame is a fascinating character study. The film’s emphasis is less on plot — Brandon drifts from one sexual liaison to the next without a whole lot of direction or purposefulness — and more on examining what’s happening to Brandon as he grapples with trying to make connections without other people. The way I saw it, sex is the only way in which he can connect, and when women — his sister and a beautiful co-worker, played by Nicole Beharie, begin to make demands on him that involve anything even remotely emotional, his world begins to fall apart.
We first saw Fassbender in Hunger, McQueen’s 2008 brilliant first feature about the 1981 Irish hunger strike. Fassbender was amazing in that role, and he’s equally great here. Both films focus on Fassbender’s body, but in very different ways. In Hunger, his character starves himself to death. Here, Brandon is obsessed with replacing the emotional with the physical. He’s a man who can’t satiate his emotional needs with sex, but he nevertheless tries and tries and tries.
The hottest ticket on Broadway right now is Other Desert Cities, a family/political drama by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who my be best known for creating the television drama Brothers & Sisters. Like that show’s early days, Other Desert Cities explores big political issues by filtering them through a family’s internal rifts, recriminations, and love for one another.
The third–and best–show that PJ and I saw in New York with our friends last week was Seminar, which stars Alan Rickman as Leonard, a problematic creative writing instructor teaching a private seminar for four up and coming writers. Paying $5,000 for the opportunity to study with him, these four students get more than they bargained for as Leonard upends all of their notions of what it means to be a successful writer.
Here are a few clips from the production:
The second show PJ and I saw last week in New York was the revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives starring Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross, who play Amanda and Elyot, respectively, a divorced couple who meet again during their honeymoons with their new spouses.
As is our annual tradition, PJ and I spent a week in New York this past week. The first show we saw this year was the revival of Sondheim’s Follies, which is great! We saw Bernadette Peters in A Little Night Music last year, and so we couldn’t wait to see her in this show too.
