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October 1, 2014

Is there a movie marathon more unlikely than the ’80s weepie Terms of Endearment, followed by the ’70s noir Le Cercle Rouge and topped with the ’60s Euro-rhapsody Doctor Zhivago? Not all the popcorn and Raisinets in the world could justify a lineup like that. And yet in Alan Smithee Directed This Play: Triple Feature, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Big Dance Theater pulps these same three flicks into a patchwork of fur hats, lawn chairs, rotary telephones, cigarettes, handguns and torment. There’s little reason and less sense, but the piece is conceived and performed with wit and flair. And those fur hats are pretty nifty. “Alan Smithee” is the pseudonym the Directors Guild of America uses when one of its own is so dissatisfied with a film that he or she refuses credit. That’s clearly an in-joke between Big Dance’s long-married co-directors, the choreographer Annie-B Parson and the performer Paul Lazar. On a mostly bare stage, seven actors (Mr. Lazar among them) whirl and sweep, reciting lines from the various films and the books that inspired them. Promiscuously, the performers trade roles and sometimes several actors will play the same character in the same scene.

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