This Week in New Haven (January 15 – 21)

A s we honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory, other echoes from the past also make us think, feel and celebrate. 

Monday, January 15 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day
“When we learn to play together, we will know how to live together,” the Eli Whitney Museum (915 Whitney Ave, Hamden; 203-777-1833), inspired by MLK’s message of peace and hope, says. That’s why it’s offering kids between the ages of 6 and 12 a day of building and playing “with games and toys from parts of the world where play has been disrupted by conflict”—diversions and educations that have “followed families for centuries from China, Africa, and India, through the Near East, to Europe and to America.” Lasting from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., registration costs $65 or $60 for museum members, with 10% of funds going to a girls’ soccer team in Pakistan and another 10% going to Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services right here in New Haven.

The Peabody Museum’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Legacy of Environmental and Social Justice” continues from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., featuring “world-class performances, community open mics and educational activities for visitors of all ages.” Free. 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven. (203) 432-8987.

Meanwhile, at 2 p.m. in First and Summerfield United Methodist Church (425 College St, New Haven), Music Haven and St. Luke’s Steel Band are teaming up for their annual MLK Day concert, which is also free to attend.

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Tuesday, January 16
Starting at 6:30 p.m., the world’s top-ranked squash player, Gregory Gaultier, is playing an exhibition match inside Payne Whitney Gym (70 Tower Pkwy, New Haven). The event is hosted by Pinnacle Squash, a local “junior squash academy that focuses on developing and training players of all skill levels,” with tickets costing $25 or $15 for “juniors and students.”

Wednesday, January 17
Preview performances of Long Wharf Theatre’s Office Hour begin at 7 o’clock tonight. Written by Obie winner Julia Cho and directed by Lisa Peterson, the play follows a college student who seems disturbed and a professor who “is the only one willing to get close, to try to understand what the student is going through. But at what peril to herself?” $34.50-80.50. 222 Sargent Dr, New Haven. (203) 787-4282.


Thursday, January 18
Featuring members of Beatles A to Z, a project tasked with ably playing every Beatles song ever recorded, Pacific Standard Tavern (212 Crown St, New Haven) hosts a two-set concert of “your favorite later-era Beatles songs played through the lens of psychedelia!” Showtime is 9:30 and admission is $10.

Friday, January 19
Apparently, it’s back. Hull’s, a historic New Haven beer brewed from 1872 to 1977 with a hiatus during Prohibition, is getting a relaunch at Three Sheets (372 Elm St, New Haven; 475-202-6909) starting at 8 p.m. According to the bartender with whom we spoke, an intrepid brewer has purchased both the brand and its flagship Hull’s Export Lager recipe, the results of which you’ll be able to buy “all weekend” for $4 a can. Adding extra hops is the local punk band The Hulls, which takes the stage at 9 tonight. Free to attend.

Saturday, January 20
Like its primary subject, the documentary film The Rape of Recy Taylor (2017), screening at 3 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St, New Haven; 203-432-0670), tells its story with conviction and vitality. As a “a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper… in 1944 Alabama,” the film’s synopsis says, Taylor was raped by a gang of six white men; and instead of remaining silent for fear of reprisal, as most such victims did in the era of Jim Crow, she elected to identify her attackers. Rosa Parks—an attempted rape victim herself who would, in 1955, gain a spot in popular history for sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott—was sent by the NAACP to investigate, an intersection the filmmakers say demonstrates the connectedness of seemingly disparate events up to and including America’s current reckoning with issues surrounding sexual assault and rape. A Q&A with Nancy Buirski, the director, and Crystal Feimster, a professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies at Yale, follows the screening. Free.

Sunday, January 21
Lone Star (1996), starring Chris Cooper as a small-town sheriff investigating a decades-old murder and finding answers he didn’t bargain for, is one of those movies you probably never saw, with a box office gross of less than $13 million and hardly any awards buzz. But it’s also one of those movies that “contains so many riches, it humbles ordinary movies,” according to the late Roger Ebert—the sort of great obscure film we can count on Yale’s Film Study Center to revive, if only for a single screening. Like yesterday’s, the showing is free and takes place in the Whitney Humanities Center, this time at 2 p.m.

Written by Dan Mims. Photographed by Colin Caplan. Readers are encouraged to verify times, locations and prices before attending events.

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Dan has worked for a couple of major media companies, but he likes Daily Nutmeg best. As DN’s editor, he writes, photographs, edits and otherwise shepherds ideas into fully realized feature stories.

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