Extreme violence as art…

Apparently there was some kind of football game on TV last night, blocking out what we regularly watch, so Elly and I watched a movie instead.

Christopher Walken

Since we replaced Dish with Comcast six months ago, we have access to their xfinity channel which is loaded with movies and catch-up shows that you missed during the week (wow… allows us to keep up with our favorite comedy, Big Bang Theory). Running over the free movies we discovered King Of New York  on the IFC Channel which we had never seen before.

This was a 1990 film with Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes and

Larence Fishburne

Lawrence Fishburne, which IMDB said would be a “stylish and ultra violent modern twist on Robin Hood.” When they said violent, they were not kidding.

This was the bloodiest, most violent movie I have ever seen…and all the main characters (and most of the stringers) were dead by the end of the film, having been shredded by machine guns or blown up in their cars, etc.

The problem was, we couldn’t keep our eyes off of it. This was a remarkably well-made film (Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 71%, which is not bad – 10% above the average rating). Part of their description:

The gritty underbelly of New York’s complex, ethnically divided criminal world is exposed in this dark drama from director Abel Ferrara. Christopher Walken stars as Frank White, a drug lord who’s just been released from a long stint in prison. Aware that feeding off of society’s depravity has made him a wealthy man, Frank has become determined to give something back to the city, and he hatches a scheme to build a multimillion-dollar public hospital in one of Brooklyn’s worst ghettos …

So it’s a kill all the drug competition and give the millions you make selling illegal drugs to the poor. The New York locations brought my 7 years there back to mind (a particularly nasty sequence on the Flushing Line, which I used to ride home on, made me feel like I was there.)

If you can take extremely bloody conflict, endless bad language, sexual and drug manipulation and not a good guy in sight, police or criminal, take a look at this one. But don’t say you haven’t been warned.

The Woman Who Invented Off-Off-Broadway… Ellen Stewart Dies at 91.

Ellen Stewart in 2006 (NY Times Photo)

If it were not for Ellen Stewart there would probably never have been a Robert De Niro or an Al Pacino or an Olympia Dukakis or any one of a thousand successful actors, playwrights or directors. When she founded LaMaMa in 1971 in a 4th Street Basement, the Chicago-born, Southern-raised dress designer had no previous interest in theatre, but had a foster brother who had written plays and wanted to get them produced.

Stewart founded LaMaMa in the basement of her apartment building, eventually building up to a complex of four theatres, art gallery, and and rehearsal space. She continued working virtually up to the time of her death, producing an average of 70 plays a year. Her influence was worldwide. With the $300,000 MacArthur grant she bought a former monastery in Umbria, Italy, and turned it into an international theater center.

She was rarely commercial…in it for the plays but not the money. She defied Actors Equity rules about how much to pay actors (in the original few years they had no money) by calling LaMaMa a “Theater Club” and her ticket sales were “Membership Fees.” She was even known to produce some earlier short works by famous playwrights without getting permission.

Neighbors initially tried to close the theater down. They thought she was running a brothel, she said in interviews. Otherwise, why would so many white men be visiting a black woman in a basement?

“Eighty percent of what is now considered the American theater originated at La MaMa,” said Harvey Fierstein, another LaMaMa graduate.

“I can’t imagine La MaMa without her. There may be a place called La MaMa that somebody brings good avant-garde international theater to, but it will not be La MaMa. La MaMa is her,” said Director Elizabeth Swados.

Farewell, Ms. Stewart…farewell La Mama.

Related Articles

• New York theater pioneer Ellen Stewart dies (omg.yahoo.com)
• Ellen Stewart of LaMaMa Has Died at 91 (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Off-Off-Broadway pioneer Ellen Stewart dies (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Ellen Stewart, the Queen of the East Village (theawl.com)