Review: "Cimino's Defeat" Is the Audience's Victory

Cimino's Defeat

Written by Eric Faris

Co-directed by Sam Cini and Ryan Czerwonko

Presented by Adult Film at Torn Page

435 W 22nd St., Manhattan, NYC

January 20-February 14, 2026

Gia Bonello and Tad D'Agostino. Photo by GEVE.

It's no great insight to observe that many (overwhelmingly male) "geniuses" in the arts are controlling perfectionists prone to mistreating those around them, including their collaborators. In the history of modern cinema, Stanley Kubrick arguably represents the most prominent example of this type. Michael Cimino, director and co-writer of 1978's The Deer Hunter, is another; and, in 1980, both men released films notoriously produced with an obsessive dedication to their respective directors' visions: The Shining and Heaven's Gate. The former debuted to mixed reviews, while the latter destroyed Cimino's career, although he would direct a handful more films before his death in 2016. While Kubrick's film is now considered a masterpiece of the horror genre, Cimino's radical reimagining of the Western has received less universal reappraisal, though the fact that critical opinion has shifted suggests that perhaps audiences generally prefer limited generic reinvention of the type offered by Clint Eastwood's less challenging but highly lauded Unforgiven twelve years later. The momentous period for Cimino between the releases of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, which took him from Oscar-winner to outcast in two short years, is the focus of Eric Faris's new play, Cimino's Defeat, making its world premiere at Chelsea's Torn Page in a phenomenal production by the consistently excellent Adult Film.

Kristiana Priscantelli and Hannah Hale. Photo by GEVE.

The majority of Adult Film's recent productions have been staged in non-traditional spaces, and Cimino's Defeat continues that trend, with Torn Page offering an intimate space inside a historic Manhattan residence. Intimate here means that audience members are close enough to the performers that we could, for example, hear the brush of one actor's hand against the fabric of another's shirt during one scene, adding immeasurably to the voyeuristic, behind-the-scenes feel. When the play begins, the small table at the center of the living-room-sized performance space holds cigarettes, bourbon, coffee, and the script for Deer Hunter, which we shortly learn that writer Deric Washburn (Matthew Zimmerman), who had previously partnered with Cimino on another film, has been working on, albeit for less money and less credit than he expected. Cimino's (Tad D'Agostino) disagreement with and treatment of Washburn becomes emblematic–and one might view his reputation for not sharing credit with others as mirroring the argument that auteur theory obscures the collaborative nature of filmmaking. It's Cimino's reputation for being difficult that concerns United Artists producer Jack Field (Jeremy Cohen), who also bemoans the backstabbing that characterizes the industry in general, in his meeting with Joann Carelli (Gia Bonello). Joann had formerly dated Cimino and is now working with him as production consultant on Deer Hunter, insulating the filmmaker from the business side of cinema's art and commerce binary. By the time that Heaven's Gate is going wildly over time and over budget, a second UA exec, Derek Kavanagh (Trevor Clarkson), has been added to the mix and is failing at his assignment to keep Cimino in check during filming in Montana; and while Joann is still working with Cimino, she is also seeing the composer on the film, David Mansfield (Joey D'Amore). Interspersed with these scenes from the waning years of New Hollywood are scenes with an older Cimino (Hannah Hale, whose casting perhaps nods to later-life rumors about the reclusive director's gender identity), now going by Nicki, and waitress and aspiring actress Cindy Lee (Kristiana Priscantelli), interactions which provide only part of the show's answer to the question of whether it is possible for someone like Cimino to be graceful in defeat.

Gia Bonello and Jeremy Cohen. Photo by GEVE.

If Kavanagh can't stand up to the formidable Joann, he seems equally intimidated by the much younger Penny (Kristiana Priscantelli), whose job on Heaven's Gate and defense of Cimino's process carry the heavy irony that she is the daughter of one of the stars of Jaws (1975), generally credited at the first blockbuster, ushering in the beginning of the end for the risk-taking auteurism of the New Hollywood era. And if the lonely, paranoid, heavy-drinking Nicki is a result of this fundamental shift, traits of Cimino's personality, including a seeming inability to avoid pushing others away and a fixation on having reality, whether a film shot or his own personal appearance, match his internal image of it were in place before any industrial change and contribute just as much to Nicki's isolation. Cimino's Defeat is not primarily concerned with psychoanalyzing its title character, but it does have him mention his "mean" alcoholic father and bad childhood to Field, and, at another time, Kavanagh floats the idea that Cimino "demands total control of his Art 'cause he can’t receive it in his life." The play situates New-Hollywood Cimino as one part of a whirlwind of forceful personalities, high-running emotions, intense creative and libidinal energies, and lots and lots of cocaine. The show makes inspired, creative use of light(s) throughout, as it does (and as is characteristic of Adult Film's work) of a marked physicality in the performances, whether the characters are flirting, fighting, or topping off their stimulant levels. (At the performance that we attended, one of the doors to the performance area became uncooperative, but that breakdown just fit seamlessly into the narrative/thematic trajectory of the show.) While the final scene between Cimino and Joann involves a symbolic movement by the pair, the performances are otherwise firmly and impressively naturalistic (bringing us back to that above-mentioned feeling of being in the room, as it were). Clarkson's Kavanagh is hilariously hapless, and Priscantelli's Penny and Cindy Lee are each, in different ways, humorously overconfident. D'Amore's David comes across, in comparison with those around him, as almost comically reasonable, even if he can't keep his hands off Joann at inappropriate times, while Cohen lends layers to Field's blustery persona, and Zimmerman expertly traces the deleterious effects on Washburn of Cimino's treatment. Bonello is an absolute force as Joann, and D'Agostino and Hale as Cimino and Nicki render the genius sympathetic, understandable, and even, in his artistic commitment, admirable, if not especially likeable. New Hollywood, of course, produced no shortage of unlikeable protagonists, so perhaps the must-see Cimino's Defeat carries on the tradition of that era even as it examines it.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards