Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri bring Many Happy Returns to Playwrights Horizons next month (photo by Paula Lobo)
Who: Monica Bill Barnes & Company
What: Hybrid scripted and improvised work
Where: Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: January 9-18, free with advance registration
Why: On its website, Monica Bill Barnes & Company announces, “Bringing dance where it doesn’t belong.” In the summer of 2021, the troupe, founded in New York City in 1997, staged Many Happy Returns, a dance-theater work that was devised as a one-time-only event commissioned by WP Theater to celebrate the return of in-person shows, reuniting performer and audience in the same space. From January 9 to 18, they will be happily presenting an expanded version of the show at Playwrights Horizons, a venue not usually associated with dance. Admission to all ten performances is free with advance registration.
In the show, which deals with memory and solace, co-artistic directors Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri portray Barnes as a middle-age woman, with Barnes as the body and Saenz de Viteri the voice. Many Happy Returns combines scripted material with improvisation, as Saenz de Viteri types out new moments on the spot, inspired by the audience.
“So much is changing about what it means to be making live work now. That ever-shifting ground is pretty unsettling for a lot of us, in a lot of ways,” Barnes said in a statement. “Robbie and I felt like, ‘You know what? We want to make our own ever-shifting landscape to live in.’ It’s this joyful thing that’s also terrifying as a classically trained dancer; it’s an actor’s nightmare that I keep saying, enthusiastically, yes to.”
Saenz de Viteri noted, “Monica and I have no similarity in terms of training, but we laugh at the same things, and we get upset about a lot of the same things. In a crowded place, we find ourselves noticing a lot of the same things. Those overlaps became the grounds, many years ago, for starting to make things together. In Many Happy Returns, we’re taking all the pieces that make up a ‘character’ onstage — a story, a background, a specific way of moving, a specific way of talking — and breaking them all apart from each other. This fragmentary character of ‘Monica’ has allowed us both to channel some really vulnerable aspects of ourselves and share them in a different way than we ever have in our work — to ask how we make ourselves, out in the world, on a day to day basis.”
The piece is choreographed by Barnes, written by Saenz de Viteri, and performed by them along with Flannery Gregg, Mykel Marai Nairne, and Indah Mariana or Hsiao-Jou Tang; the directing consultant is three-time Obie winner Anne Kauffman (The Thugs, Mary Jane), with lighting and set design by Barbara Samuels and costumes by Kaye Voyce.
“Live performance feels like it needs a revolution right now, and not a revolution that involved burning everything down — but rather picking up the pieces and making new forms,” Kauffman said. “As a director, I love it — Monica and Robbie are stretching their brains and trying to conceive something that feels like it doesn’t exist yet. Playwrights Horizons and [artistic director] Adam Greenfield are always thinking in that way; in the rubble of theater postpandemic, he’s been putting words to actions in his programming. As a theater artist of over thirty-five years, watching Monica and Robbie and knowing Playwrights is the next presenter of Many Happy Returns, I feel so excited, like something new is bubbling up.”
Greenfield added, “Historically, Playwrights Horizons’ programming has excluded playwrights who create new work via interdisciplinary, non-literary methods (e.g., ensemble-devised work, improvisation, physical theater), and — in continuation of this theater’s longtime dedication to advancing playwrights — I want to think expansively about what that word means. From the moment I was first introduced to Many Happy Returns last year, I became eager to include these artists in our programming, not only because it affirms experimentation in the field of new plays, but because — in its very conception — this play embodies powerfully the inclusive, galvanizing potential of theater, as an art form and as a civic act.”
Act fast to get your free tickets — and be ready for the lack of a price to be incorporated into the relationship between performer, audience, and their respective expectations in Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]