new york city

My relationship with New York was both beautiful and heart-wrenchingly abusive.

No one was to blame. Everyone was to blame. The City was to blame.

I remember falling so deeply for the City. I was in my late-teens, clumsily asserting my independence by flying from a sleepy small town in Montana to the City That Never Sleeps. I placed myself squarely amongst the cockroach filled buildings of Brooklyn, oozing with a culture so different from my own.

In the early days of our relationship, New York could truly do no wrong. Enamored, I couldn’t see the grime for what it was — instead, I saw each stained subway tile and each pile of glossy black trashbags as art. The snarls and curses passed between quarreling pedestrians was poetry. The palpable stench of a subway car in the heat of summer was perfume. Walking home at 4 a.m. to my apartment in Bushwick as a single woman, weaving drunkenly down the street didn’t seem dangerous but exciting.

I didn’t wear rose-colored glasses, I wore what is more commonly known as a blindfold. But how could I help it? Whenever my pockets were empty, New York would lead me to find a roll of money on the ground (which, I later realized must’ve belonged to a drug dealer). If I were feeling lonely, it would send me subway buskers with gravity-defying stunts as the G train hurled its way to the next stop. And if I needed help, say, moving out of one apartment and into the next with a 2nd-floor walk-up, it would bring a chatty and overly helpful Black Car driver to me who would heroically wedge a dresser and boxes into his trunk, carry everything up the two flights of stairs, and offer to take me out to a salsa club later in the week (admittedly, it was not a wise idea to bring a stranger directly into one’s apartment).

New York was my everything.

—Until, it wasn’t.

I had once heard that when the City wants you to leave, it will force you out. I didn’t take that to heart, at the time, because my New York would never do something like that to me. I mean, we were too close, had been through too much for it to send me away.

I found out my boyfriend (the person, not the City) had been cheating on me — it was a clinic who clued me in on that news, if you catch my drift. A neighbor in my building had been stealing my mail, which was annoyingly inconvenient. After a seemingly benign confrontation, her daughter started assaulting me in the stairwell. A week or so later, I found out my apartment was infested with bed bugs.

After years of struggling financially, wearing down soles of shoes from sheer number of pavement pounded miles because it’s cheaper to walk than pay for a subway ticket, and being sent home with leftover food from my restaurant job because my boss was concerned I wasn’t eating enough — I was defeated. It was spring and rain was relentless, pouring down like a broken pipe. I fell to my knees in the middle of a walkway and sobbed. The abuse was too much. I had to move, immediately.

In the years since I hastily left New York and moved to the other coast, I would think back on my time with the City. My memory of the abuse faded little-by-little. The scars lightened and I could only seem to recall the good times. I’d get a pang in my heart whenever I would see an “I love NY” shirt, I’d shed a few tears upon hearing Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”

…These lights will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you…

American utopia

My love for David Byrne is expansive.  I would pay money to watch him paint a chair on stage and, with rapt attention, watch the paint dry.  

But I assure you, I’m taking much of my glowing prejudice out of this review to share a semi- un-biased opinion.

As of now, February 2022, American Utopia can be viewed at the Saint James Theater on 246 W 44th St in the one and only New York, NY.  The setting of the late 1920s theater is important as the Neo-Gregorian style, with idyllic scenes painted atop the ceiling between ornate chandeliers and lush red seats seem to further the play on utopia.  I overheard a woman (gender?) in the seat behind me telling her companion that whenever David Byrne is not actively preparing for his shows, he can be seen riding his bike around the neighborhood.  I can appreciate this image of the legendary rocker leisurely pedaling around the City - and I believe the hearsay, too, as he did author a book titled, Bicycle Diaries, in 2009.

American Utopia first hit Broadway in late 2019 but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hit a hiatus until late 2021.  I imagine its initial viewers from the Old World had quite a different experience than those of us in the New World, ragged and masked from years of an unrelenting pandemic.  Nevertheless, we moved into the theater with masked faces through vaccination status checkpoints with vibrating anticipation.  The usher passed out Playbills and informed each group, “The show is nearly 2 hours with no intermission,” as we found our way to our seats.

Waiting for the show to begin, one hears the usual chatter from fans: I once saw David walking around the city, yeah — we were this close! and I remember watching him perform in the late ‘80s. Can you believe that?  Once the lights dimmed in the theater and the illustrated front curtain drew up, the crowd either hushed or cheered, both signs of enthusiasm. David sat on a chair behind a desk, an anatomical brain prop in his hand.  A silver-chained curtain encircled the stage, hung low with the chain piled up on the ground.  Before David (I feel I’m on a first-name basis with him now) spoke, the chained curtain slowly raised, in a way, encircling all of us, wrapping us into the world of American Utopia.

The show was spectacular.  Not in a flashy way like The Lion King, filled with costumes and dynamic set design, but in its own, unique way.  The simplicity of the set design created a minimal dystopian space for the performers.  The costumes, all grey suits, provided a uniformity to the performers and, dare I say, an apt commentary on the hustle of the runway train that is the American workforce.  Barefoot performers, contrasting with the formality of their business suits, wear custom harnesses to play their instruments while dancing along to the music. The bare feet seem to be a form of liberation from the “adulthood”, as though within David’s Utopia, the child-self is working to wriggle its way out.  And David, dressed identically to the other performers, seemed to imply a communal stake in the artistry of the show, not his art but theirs.

Although I’ve long admired the percussive mastery of David’s music, I had not realized he is also a master storyteller.  Hearing some Talking Heads’ songs within the context of a live Broadway show made the words and messages clearer and gave me insight into the person that David is or at least aspires to be.  He reveals a vulnerability, trepidation about the current state of America, and yet, there is a through-line of hopefulness.  

The audience is taken on an emotional ride throughout the 100 minute performance.

The show, since its initial opening, is an evolving creature, having been adapted and modified to fit current events, including a protest song by Janelle Monåe wherein the names of our Black community whose blood has been shed unjustly are chanted.  Amir Lock. Amir Locke. Amir Locke. Say his name.  Breonna Taylor.  Breonna Taylor.  Breonna Taylor. Say her name.

There are moments where I wept, hot tears streaming down to be collected by the mask covering the lower half of my face.  There were moments when we, as the audience, jumped to our feet to awkwardly dance in front of our seats, trying to remember how to rhythmically move our bodies in front of strangers as it had been so long now.  In those between moments, looking around the theater, heads and hearts nodded to the beat.  All the while, the message of American Utopia worked its way into each of us, organically, gently, and best of all — never preachy.

As the show came to a close, the snakelike chain curtain lowered. The spell was broken. And we were released back into the wilds of our existence from the dream that is American Utopia.

I left the show with every one of my cells buzzing, a changed person, even so slightly.