CITY LIGHTS

City Lights Deaf U

Less than a decade after graduating with a degree in mathematics from Gallaudet University, a private college in D.C. for deaf and hard of hearing students, Nyle DiMarco is bringing Deaf U to Netflix. Since receiving his diploma, DiMarco has pursued a life of deaf activism, and he has also taken home the crown from reality shows America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars. Now, he’s the executive producer on a reality show that aims to highlight all aspects of life at Gallaudet. The show focuses on a tightknit group of students—Daequan Taylor, Cheyanna Clearbrook, Renate Rose, and Rodney Buford—plus their dates, friends, and classmates. Each student has a different background, and they’ve taken different paths to end up at Gallaudet. For instance, Taylor was born with hearing abilities, but lost them at 6 years old. He shares on Deaf U that it took him two years after admission to Gallaudet to learn American Sign Language. DiMarco has previously said that the point of the show is to prove that deaf people are human—that they experience the same, diverse life as hearing people. And as a reality show, Deaf U also promises to showcase the “highs, lows, and hookups” of college life at Gallaudet, featuring plenty of shots of prepandemic life in D.C., bars, restaurants, and trendy neighborhoods included. The series is available on Netflix. Free with subscription. —Sarah Smith

City Lights

Allan Gerson: Border Wall

Allan Gerson, who died last year at 74, was a Washington attorney and foreign affairs expert who fought a yearslong court battle on behalf of families of victims of the terrorist bomb that downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988. In his off-hours, Gerson was a photographer, mounting his first exhibition while working in the Justice Department in the mid-’80s. Now, a posthumous exhibit at the American University Museum features his images of the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, a topic that couldn’t be timelier. Gerson’s images, shown in a virtual exhibit due to the pandemic, aren’t fancy, befitting their gritty subject. The worn and rusted metal walls he documents are sometimes topped by razor wire and are often adorned with graffiti and amateur paintings: faces that straddle the line between goofy and menacing, a clenched fist, a skeleton, a deadeyed eagle, even the Spanish translation of an Oscar Wilde quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.” Gerson’s focus on human rights stemmed from his experience in a displaced persons camp in Germany, after his Jewish family fled from the Nazis and then from the Soviets. The exhibition and the catalogue are available at american.edu. Free. —Louis Jacobson

City Lights

Anacostia Delta: The Legend of DC’s TeleMasters

For years, local filmmakers Bryan Reichhardt and Virginia Quesada have both been at work on separate projects about late D.C. guitarist Danny Gatton, who Guitar Player magazine once called the “world’s greatest unknown guitarist.” Reichhardt’s effort, Anacostia Delta: The Legend of DC’s TeleMasters, is the first one available for viewing. Quesada’s film is intended to be a biographical look at Gatton onstage and off; Reichhardt’s film is instead an appreciation of Gatton’s rockabilly-meets-jazz, blues, and country playing, as well as that of the late guitarist Roy Buchanan and other D.C.-area-based roadhouse roots rockers from the late 1950s onward. Utilizing footage of a 2015 tribute concert at The Birchmere, with interviews and archival clips woven in, the movie documents the D.C.-area musical scene that, per the title, extended from Gatton’s childhood home on Elmira Street SE down through long-gone clubs in Prince George’s County and Charles County. Nashville’s Vince Gill and the UK’s Albert Lee spell out how musicians who were in the know respected Gatton and Buchanan, while the local artists who played with those two Telecaster slingers offer stories about how they resisted stardom. Onstage at The Birchmere, locals including bassist John Previti and guitarist Anthony Pirog bring Gatton’s take on jazz standard “Harlem Nocturne” to life. While Anacostia Delta does not offer speculative details on Gatton’s 1994 death by suicide at 49 or Buchanan’s 1988 death in a Fairfax jail cell, it celebrates and explains Gatton’s selfdescribed “redneck jazz,” Buchanan’s bluesrock, and why they happened here. The film is available to purchase at anacostiadelta.com. $11–$19.99. —Steve Kiviat

City Lights

Basketball County: In the Water Tough. Gritty. Second to none. The mecca. Those are just some of the words used to describe basketball in Prince George’s County by some of the sport’s top talents in the Showtime documentary Basketball County: In the Water, directed by John Beckham and Jimmy Jenkins. The county has the names to back up those boasts: Kevin Durant, Len Bias, Adrian Dantley, Victor Oladipo, Michael Beasley, Markelle Fultz, Marissa Coleman, and Steve Francis all hail from the area, and while Durant features as a central figure throughout the 51-minute film, it’s their collective pride and connection to their home that lifts up the documentary. The directors glide efficiently through several chapters of the county’s expansive history with the game, and given the amount of material, each could have been its own documentary. Edwin Henderson, considered the “father of Black basketball,” brought the sport to D.C. in the early 1900s. In 1968, many Black families moved from D.C. to Prince George’s County after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent uprising in the city. Kids turned to basketball as a haven, and with dozens of community recreation centers and parks in the county, talented players like Durant and Beasley had the opportunity to excel in the sport. Players like Beasley and Nolan Smith even credit go-go as an influence on how they play the game. But to these players, Prince George’s County is more than a place that produces basketball talent. It’s home. The film is available to watch on Showtime. Free with subscription. —Kelyn Soong

City Lights

The National Theatre’s Music

Mondays Thanks to COVID-19, I haven’t seen a play or musical in a theater since January. I’ve tried to fill that hole in my heart with virtual cast reunions and filmed productions, but one can only watch Hamilton so many times before it becomes repetitive. I’ve mainly been ingesting theater in the form of show tunes played while I wash dishes at the end of the day. Thank goodness, then, for the National Theatre, which is trying to bridge the Broadway gap with a series of Spotify playlists. Dubbed “Music Monday,” each playlist has a specific theme, be it songs about work, excerpts from shows that visited the National in the past year, or selections from shows that had their pre-Broadway tryouts at the venue. The latter option is the best place to start—it combines pieces from popular contemporary musicals (Beetlejuice, Mean Girls) that locals may have seen at the National with selections from beloved classics (Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) with forgotten D.C. origins.