Zoetrope’s Performance Space
134 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn
Thursday – Sunday, May 1-23, $35
www.exquisitecorpsecompany.com
Cofounded in 2012 by artistic director Tess Howsam, Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse Company produces site-specific works in unusual places; Odd.A.See was set in the basement of an abandoned hospital ward, The Chechens and Killjoy were staged in a Fifth Ave. loft, and A Ribbon About a Bomb, Secession 2015, The Enchanted Realm of Rene Magritte, and Water, Water, Everywhere . . . made their way through houses on Governors Island. With the coronavirus crisis preventing the troupe from finding another unique space, ECC presented Insulted. Belarus(sia) on Zoom last fall.
Now the company has brought together the outside and the inside with Zoetrope. The interactive, immersive thirty-five-minute show, written by ECC writers-in-residence Elinor T Vanderburg, Leah Barker, and Emily Krause and directed by Porcia Lewis and Howsam, unfolds in a cramped New York City apartment on a cargo trailer bed on Vanderbilt Ave. in Brooklyn. Five audience members at a time watch the action through socially distanced windows and listen on headphones as Angel and Bae (and their fish) deal with the pandemic, politics, racism, and their relationship; the cast features Jules Forsberg-Lary, Leana Gardella, Vanessa Lynah, and Starr Kirkland. A button next to each window allows viewers to impact the action in the room, which is decorated in black-and-white by designers Emily Addision and Dominica Montoya and is so tiny that the most important member of the team might be intimacy director Daniella Caggiano. Zoetrope runs Thursdays to Sundays, May 1-23; tickets are $35, but the code PREVIEW will save you ten bucks May 1-2.