Sunday Afternoon in Sunnyside: St. Pat's for All Parade from Skillman Ave & 47th Street to Woodside Avenue & 58th Street

(Video courtesy Christian Murray) (Video courtesy Ruby Wara-Goss)

Wednesday Night in Sunnyside: Hip to Hip Theatre Company presents "Taming of the Shrew" in Sunnyside Gardens Park

It's always a pleasure to take the B24 bus to Sunnyside, and tonight was even more enjoyable than usual for we were able to catch a nicely-executed, swift-moving production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew by the Hip to Hip Theatre Company in the lush confines of the private Sunnyside Gardens Park.

We just missed the B-24 bus at our corner (Metropolitan and Lorimer), but since the route boomerangs eccentrically between Williamsburg and Greenpoint via Sunnyside, we just hopped on the G train two stops north and got the B-24 from the other end, at Manhattan and Greenpoint Avenues, getting a block from Queens Boulevard quickly. (Luckily it wasn't a weekend; as of late June, the MTA has eliminated Saturday and Sunday service, an inconvenience for us and a real hardship for others.)

We walked up 47th Street to 39th Avenue; Sunnyside Gardens, the first planned community in the country, built in the 1920s, is stately and gorgeous on a summer evening. It's also where the concept of the superblock was born, so the blocks are long.

Sunnyside Gardens Park on 39th Avenue, just south of the Long Island Rail Road, is one of New York City's two private parks open to residents. But unlike Gramercy Park, anyone who pays the annual fee and devotes twelve hours of volunteer work, may be a member. We were grateful for the chance to come in for free. The three acres are lovely and there are really good recreational facilities for people of all ages.

Hip to Hip Theatre Company, founded in 2007, has been bringing free Shakespeare to the parks of underserved Queens, since then. Tonight was the opening of their season, and nearly every night between now and August 29, they'll be presenting Macbeth and Taming of the Shrew

at various locations, including Flushing Meadows Park, Forest Park, Totten Park, Queensbridge Park, Gantry Plaza State Park and more, including a stint in Southampton's Agawam Park. They did the same last year with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Taming of the Shrew is a problematic play due to its seeming endorsement of misogyny and male supremacy, which may have made audiences even in Shakespeare's day uneasy, which accounts for the frame story (Shakespeare calls it an "induction") of the main action being a play put on for a poor tinker being punk'd by a lord into thinking that he too is a noble and given a pageboy in women's clothes and told "she" is his wife.

Here the frame is eliminated, as it is in many productions, but it reinforces both the idea that our environment and the way we are treated by others determines our behavior — an idea that Katherine’s transformation from nasty scold to submissive wife in the main play also illustrates — and that our social status and gender/relationship roles, seen as rigidly determined, are essentially matters of appearance and perception that can be manipulated freely by deception, though never quite escaped.

Although this play ends, like almost all Shakespeare's comedies, with multiple brides and grooms, Katherine and Petruchio have been married for a while, and Taming of the Shrew also observes the post-wedding marital tensions for the two other couples (Bianca and Lucentio, the widow and Hortensio).

Our only previous experience seeing Taming of the Shrew was twenty years ago in Central Park, where we saw A.J. Antoon's unforgettable transposition of the play's action to the Wild West, complete with all the cliches of the American Western. It starred Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman in thrilling performances.

The scene where Freeman twirls his lasso and ropes Ullman like she's a runaway calf is indelibly fixed in our memory. (Antoon directed our other favorite Shakespeare productions, the Gay 90s Much Ado About Nothing in 1973 and the breathtaking Bahia-set Midsummer Night's Dream in 1987.)

That experience probably spoiled us a bit. The Hip to Hip Theatre Company's version, though, is a wonderful traditional production of the comedy; it's really old school, with men in tights and other Elizabethean conventions. For the first few scenes, the line readings seemed a bit over the top to us, the gestures slightly hammy, but we've become accustomed to more naturalistic performances rather than the classical version we got tonight.

Many people, including a colleague at one of the colleges where we teach who teaches a Shakespeare course every semester, absolutely despise any production of the Bard's plays not employing Renaissance dress and traditional staging. We're a product of the Sixties, and since our first Shakespeare-in-the-park production forty years ago, a hippie-ish Midsummer Night's Dream in Prospect Park, we've preferred rethinkings of the text and imaginative, radical transformations of the setting.

Anyway, that's our own prejudices, and that said, Elizabeth Carlson's direction of Shrew for Hip to Hip was perfectly delightful. The actors, led by Jason Marr as a buoyant, playful Petruchio and Joy Marr as a somewhat ironic Kate, are actually quite subtle and each of them had at least one moment of brilliant bits of business.

(The audience was asked not to take photographs and we complied, except for the pre-Shrew entertaining recitations of Shakespeare sonnets, songs and some swordplay, to give an idea of the setup and audience at Sunnyside Gardens Park.)

The director and actors avoid the problem of turning the comedy too dark because Petruchio is not played as an uncaring, dominating chauvinist and Kate's submission seems pragmatic and not entirely without tongue in cheek. The way the two principals interact - and we guess their own marriage may inform the way they interpret the roles - is the joy of this production.

Although the play is filled with lots of slapstick and an extraordinary number of deceptions in the subplots of Bianca and her suitors, the Hip to Hip's version of Taming of the Shrew is thoughtful and insightful in its treatment of what we think of as the play's main thrust: how people's happiness in society mostly depends upon adapting, at least in some way, to the social roles assigned to us, and that the smart person ultimately at least appears to accommodate, as Kate does, to social convention.

It was a gorgeous evening and if you can get out to a Queens park, you should see the Hip to Hip Theatre Company's work in the next couple of weeks. We felt lucky to see it, and then we were lucky to just catch (we ran) a speedy B-24 bus on 48th Street and Greenpoint Avenue heading to Williamsburg and got dropped off on our corner (Metropolitan and Leonard) about fifteen minutes later.

Wednesday Night in Long Island City: Outdoor Cinema 2009 presents "Waltz with Bashir" at Socrates Sculpture Park

Since we got an afternoon email saying that Summerscreen's McCarren Park showing of Fame had been canceled due to "inclement weather," we went east to Long Island City tonight for clearer skies and the 2008 Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (ואלס עם באשיר‎) at Socrates Sculpture Park.

We don't really think it rained anywhere in the city tonight, but the early forecasts were pretty ominous. By 6 p.m. we observed that Outdoor Cinema 2009 had tweeted
Outdoor Cinema is on! Scattered showers are possible, but we will not stop rolling unless it rains. Pack an umbrella and take your chances! so we headed for Long Island City.

The G train we got on wasn't very cool, and we were schvitzing, so we got off at Greenpoint Avenue and caught the chilly B24 bus at its first stop, taking it across Greenpoint Avenue to Sunnyside. There we walked a couple of blocks and caught the Q104 for its entire route, which took us on a nice ride up Broadway through Steinway and Astoria to Vernon Boulevard, where the Socrates Sculplture Park is.

For those who don't know, it's a gorgeous park filled with fun and thought-provoking art. Lori wrote on the informative SiteBits:

Until 1986, the site of the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, was an illegal riverside landfill, abandoned and ugly. A group of local artists [led by Mark Di Suvero] got together and decided to turn the area into a park and outdoor museum.

In the summer, Socrates hosts a a free outdoor cinema featuring international films and sometimes live music. All are invited to bring a picnic and a blanket, and watch the film starting at dusk. Also throughout the summer, Socrates offers sculpture and art classes for all ages, tai chi and yoga on Saturday mornings until September 30 (all which are also free).

The park foundation awards several artists a residency each year. They may work on site, and have the opportunity to display extremely large scale work, the only location like it in New York. The sculptures change about every 6 months. Visitors are invited to look, play, climb, learn, photograph and let their dogs run around the sculptures and park.

The stats aside, the park is totally amazing. Not only is it an actual grassy space with trees, but it has a breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline and East River. There are a few meandering paths and river overlooks that SOME people might deem "romantic" (yes, there are stupid kissing couples everywhere). [Lots of dogs, too!] A walk through the park really creates a sense of detachment from the hustle and bustle of New York. The sea smells like the sea, the trees are thick in areas and private, the space is open and lush. How can this be New York?

Not to mention the amazing sculptures!

We walked around for a while, looking at the sculpture and wandering the gentle slopes around the waterfront.

The skyline looked so beautiful as the sun set.

The crowd was mixture of all kinds of people and, like the animated film being shown, featured more dogs than little kids.

In its eleventh year, Outdoor Cinema at Socrates Sculpture Park is an international film festival in cooperation with The Museum of the Moving Image, which is always worth a trip to Astoria (we've been there twice in recent years). There's also international music, dance and food, "celebrating the cultural diversity of Queens."

So tonight Naomi's Kosher Pizza and Israel Falafel from Flushing were being enjoyed by the people around us, including several guys with yarmulkes and women with hijabs.

The music by Israeli cellist Yoed Nir was sublime.


Here's a sample, from a 2007 concert in New York (he lives here now):

The movie began after Sean Leonardo, Socrates Sculpture Park's events director, welcomed us to the park and asked people to donate $5 to support the programming and get a glow-in-the-dark bracelet and after a speaker from the Museum of the Moving Image introduced Waltz with Bashir, a 2008 animated film by Ari Folman, who also is one of the writers on the TV show In Therapy.

We found the movie gripping, hauntingly beautiful and mesmerizing from its opening scene with a pack of wild dogs in a recurring dream.

A.O. Scott, reviewing Waltz with Bashir in the New York Times, called it

a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary. . . But Mr. Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power.

Tired of sitting cross-legged, we stood up for the final 20 minutes of this hallucinatory film. There were tears in our eyes most of the time as it moved to its unspeakably horrific conclusion, the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Phalangist fighters which Israeli leaders let happen.

It ends switching from animation to the graphic, horrifying images of real dead bodies and screaming, mourning Palestinian women which will always be seared into our consciousness from that summer of 1982.

That year, along with others, we signed a petition opposing the Lebanon war that appeared in a Jewish weekly.

A few months later, at our Davie, Florida address, we received a letter from a rabbi in Lynn, Massachusetts, informing us that because of that ad, we'd been excommunicated by a rabbinical court.

We hadn't known that Judaism even had such a thing as excommunication, but it looked pretty official - so that's how we became Episcopalian.

The film ended around 9:40 p.m. and we got home to Williamsburg over an hour later by taking the Q104 and then the N and 7 trains for one stop each and the G train from Court Square home to Metropolitan Avenue.

It was a great evening, and we're grateful for Socrates Sculpture Park and the Museum of the Moving Image for making available such a terrific movie for us tonight.