NYC EOY 2025 (part three)

Audrey Corsa, Irene Sofia Lucio,
Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd
"Liberation" by Bess Wohl
James Earl Jones Theatre, 2025

Randy Settenbrino, owner of the Blue Moon Hotel, provided a verbal tour of the building, its history, his history. It’s a recent renovation, including three stories that he had added. Based on our experiences in the rooms across the street, he must have reconfigured every room on each floor, ours was quite spacious for NYC, very much so for the LES.

The main floor has a cafe and a dining area, the walls decorated with collages of neighborhood history and the landlord’s paintings, of his family, of Frida Kahlo, a series on the Fall of Man.

We returned to the Tenement Museum for the 100 Years Apart tour, detailing the Wong family (1970s) and the Gumpertz family (1870s) connected by their immigrant status and their successes in the garment industry.

Randy Settenbrino

It was also a big book store day, to Sweet Pickle Books, and also the Book Club Bar for Old Overholt Manhattans and reading. We both made an effort to get at least one book from each place we visited, or only one. For lunch we returned to Felix Empanadas, the dough they use is exquisite, rich and crumbly, the filling spicy and flavorful. Boss fries, too. Apparently they have live jazz every Saturday night, from nine to midnight.

That evening we took our first train out of the neighborhood, to Times Square and a Broadway show. Following a brief return to the Rum House, we headed to the James Earl Jones Theatre to see Liberation by Bess Wohl. The play is an exploration of second-wave feminism, told from the point of view of a contemporary woman who is trying to investigate and understand the C.R. (consciousness raising) group her mother had organized in an Ohio recreation center in 1970.

Felix Empanadas

During intermission my wife and I discussed the framing device, and whether or not the personal details of the story are fact or fiction. The piece rings with truth, but it is the manner in which we enter the play, with the narrator engaging the audience directly – very directly, in fact, responding to specific audience chuckles or even verbal responses – before leading into the performance in which she makes clear when (and when not) she is playing the role of her own mother.

The actor is not the playwright. But we are meant to assume that she is. In this very effective way, we believe what we are seeing and hearing are things that actually happened, in spite of the very obvious artificiality of theatrical performance. If there were no such narrator, if the members of the group simply entered and performed their parts and there were no narrator, we might assume it is entirely fiction. Historical fiction. Accurate, but not true.

The narrator tells us it is true, and so we believe her, even though there is no other reason to believe that it is. But I want to believe that it is. An emotional work, presenting the arguments that were present then, many of which we are still debating now. It highlights the progress that has not been made, but also that which has. Liberation is an epic play, it is powerful, and it is, ultimately, hopeful.

So, it is interesting. The night before we saw a performance based on Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar which, in its original publication, was perceived as a kind of hoax — fiction presented as fact. This night we saw a piece inspired by true events, and presented with a verisimilitude that transcends its artifice. And the next night we would experience a forty year old musical which has much more recently been revised to include moments of actual historic geopolitical intrigue.

Vero nihil verius, nes pas?

To be continued.

UPDATE: On Monday, May 4, 2026 it was announced that "Liberation" by Bess Wohl received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

NYC EOY 2025 (part one)

Felix Empanadas
(Do you know this trio?
Would like to credit them.)

Since Covid, my wife and I have been making a point of visiting NYC at least once a year. It’s a city that holds so many important memories for both of us; primarily hers, she lived there for seven years. But Manhattan has changed so much since the 1990s, and we have spent a great deal of time there since, together and apart.

Toni finds the most amazing places to stay, this time it was the Historic Blue Moon Hotel on the LES, right across the street from the Tenement Museum. We checked in late on Saturday evening, and walked about the neighborhood to find necessaries (beer, wine, pain reliever).

Yes, it was Saturday night and yes, it was New York City, and yet I was surprised by the sheer density of clubs for which young people would stand in line in the freezing cold to access. As a trio of bright young things in short shirts passed us on the sludgy sidewalk, one observed, “I can’t feel my knees.”

Russ & Daughters Cafe

We passed a walkdown jazz club, we knew it was a jazz club because there was a sandwich board outside reading “Live Jazz” and though we were on a drug store mission we were both like, “Maybe? Maybe some jazz?” So when further down the street we noticed and then did a double-take on a trio wedged into one corner of a small empanada emporium, and were then waved in by a seated patron, we were primed to engage.

By then it was nearly midnight, we sat for a few numbers, an entertaining ensemble that warmed my bones and made the walk back to the hotel much more jolly. We promised each other to return for lunch before our time was through.

Sunday morning we took breakfast at Russ & Daughters Cafe and then made our first visit to the Tenement Museum, an institution which is a testament to everything the current administration hates and fears, a monument to the immigrant experience in America and to the working class in general.

The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum was founded in the late 1980s by two women, Ruth J. Abram and Anita Jacobson. 97 Orchard Street (later, 103 Orchard was also acquired) was built during the Slaveholder Rebellion (1861-65) in the style which had become prevalent, with four street front business spaces and four stories of apartments above, featuring a total of twenty apartments built specifically to accommodate the exploding immigrant population.

For the museum, many of the spaces have been restored to a state they may have appeared in when they were home to a variety of first generation Americans. Our first tour, Tenement Women: 1902, was to the home to the Levine family, when learned a great deal about the garment business, and of the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 for which the Jewish women of the Lower East Side united to mount a successful (if often violent) protest against a sudden rise in the price of beef.

Now a National Historic Site, 97 Orchard Street was required to maintain a number of spaces in the condition they were found at the time of their designation. As the landlord had decided in 1935 that bringing the residential spaces up to newly revised safety codes was no longer cost-effective, he chose rather to leave the apartments unoccupied and to only let the storefronts. You can imagine what state the apartments were in after fifty years of neglect.

It was just his kind of space – ceiling buckling, lath exposed, plaster cracked, wallpaper torn, no water, no heat, no electricity – that we can imagine being occupied by the denizens of the musical Rent, and it makes you wonder how many theatre kids would continue to fetishize “la vie Bohème” if they were forced to spend one night in such a squat.

God, I hate Mark.

To be continued.