Nothing happens in Third Law without audience participation (photo by Paris Marcel)
THIRD LAW
Culture Lab LIC
5-25 46th Ave.
Thursday – Sunday through May 26, $28.52
www.culturelablic.org
www.wwtns.org
Investigative theater company What Will the Neighbors Say? goes back to the beginning of time in the world premiere of Third Law, but its unique take on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden needs the audience to help it progress. Continuing at Culture Lab LIC through May 26, the forty-five-minute experience is part escape room, part choose-your-own-adventure in which the audience must band together in order to keep the narrative going.
Approximately twenty people remove their shoes and enter a small installation where six actors in sackcloth are lined up on a platform along a wall. Projections on the floor, wall, and two benches lead to how the play will unfold, involving sound, light, and movement. The more the audience learns about the prompts, the more it can influence what happens; thus, each performance is unique, leading up to three possible endings. As Isaac Newton’s third law of motion states, as interpreted by NASA, “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions.”
The show was devised by Shani Matoaka Bekt, Sam Hood Adrain, Megan Mariko Boggs, Pablo Calderón-Santiago, James Clements, and Melannie Vásquez Lara, who play Adam and Eve as they discuss the Creator, eating fruit, and loneliness. Much of the dialogue relates to the audience and the world outside the play as well.
Six actors portray Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in interactive production at Culture Lab LIC (photo by Paris Marcel)
“I can’t imagine being apart. What was it like when you were alone?” Eve asks. Adam replies, “It’s hard to toil by yourself.” Third Law is activated only when everyone toils in harmony.
“Would you like to be Creator?” Eve asks Adam, who responds, “To be Creator? Is that allowed?” Eve answers, “Why not?” The Creator is not only the mysterious supreme being but the cast, director Coral Cohen, lighting designer Jacqueline Scaletta, sound and video designer Cosette Pin, set designer Miles Giordani, costume designer Elizabeth Shevelev, and the audience, which wanders around the space, figuring out how and how much it can guide the action while staying out of the way of the actors.
At its heart, Third Law, a melding of art and technology inspired by gameplay, is all about the choices humans make, individually and as a group. “We should be able to choose for ourselves,” Eve says. But as we know from real life, every choice comes with consequences.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]