live performance

SOCIAL DISTANCE HALL: AFTERWARDSNESS

Performers move throughout Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Afterwardsness (photo by Stephanie Berger)

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong have given us the first great indoor, in-person, live dance presentation of and about the pandemic and the social justice movement. Running May 19-26 at Park Avenue Armory, Afterwardsness takes place in the building’s massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members are marched in formation to their seats, arranged six feet apart from one another throughout the space. In the center is a large rectangle bordered by yellow tape, evoking caution, while a twisting path in blue (representing police and authority?) is situated on the floor around the chairs, ensuring the performers keep a safe distance from the viewers. (Part of the armory’s Social Distance Hall programming, the production itself was postponed last month when several cast and crew members tested positive for Covid.)

The sixty-five minute show, named for Sigmund Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” is a complex web of physical and emotional pain and fear, performed by eight masked and barefoot dancers wearing sweatpants and T-shirts or tank tops — Barrington Hinds, Chanel Howard, Dean Husted, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Nayaa Opong, and Huiwang Zhang — along with Vinson Fraley Jr., who is dressed all in white from head to ankle, as if he were a kind of spiritual leader or ghostly apparition; all are members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. They run, roll, jump, walk, tumble, squirm, wriggle, grasp their hands behind their backs, and raise their arms above their heads like they’re under arrest, never touching each other nor making eye contact with the audience. There’s so much happening at any one moment that it’s impossible to take it all in, as if you’re at a protest rally, not knowing where to look.

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong’s Afterwardsnesstakes an emotional, powerful look at the last fourteen months in America (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The soundtrack is dazzling, featuring avant-garde jazz, snippets of familiar tunes (for example, “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle,” which both deal with class and race issues), abstract sounds, brief quotes from Jones and members of the company that can’t always be understood, excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison, and occasional grunts and noises (and a nursery rhyme). Standing alone in the yellow rectangle, music director Pauline Kim Harris plays the gorgeous, elegiac 8:46 violin solo “Homage,” a tribute to George Floyd; clarinetist Paul Wonjin Cho and others perform from wooden lifeguard chairs; composer Holland Andrews contributes a new song and vocals, including stating the date, beginning with March 13 and continuing through May 19, in one corner with Cho, pianist Vicky Chow, and cellist Caleb van der Swaagh; and the score includes original compositions from Fraley Jr. and Howard, repeating powerful phrases about suppression and murder that echo through the hall. The immersive sound design is by Mark Grey.

Brian H. Scott’s lighting design is a marvel, shifting from bright and airy to dark and ominous. At times he lights only the straight and curved pathways followed by the dancers, tracing the blue lines. He uses spotlights to elicit giant shadows and creates small boxes that trap the dancers, capturing Jones’s strong choreographic language, which ranges from confinement and isolation to freedom and hope. In the grand finale, the performers grab chairs but are hesitant to merely sit in them and watch; their jittery energy makes the audience uncomfortable but fascinated. Afterwardsness is not a dire, depressing fugue for these past fourteen months; it is both a compelling reminder of what has unfolded across America as well as a beautiful yet urgent call to action.

TICKET ALERT: THE DARK MASTER

Kuro Tanino’s The Dark Master is a VR treat for the senses (photo © Japan Society)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St.
June 23-27, $45
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

As the lockdown ends and venues start reopening, theaters are dealing with limited admissions, socially distanced seating, and protocols for the health and safety of the cast and crew. Several companies have come up with unique presentations that feature no performers and a sparse audience. In Simon Stephens’s Blindness, people sit in pods of two inside the Daryl Roth Theatre and listen to the narrative unfold through binaural headphones. In Social! at the Park Avenue Armory, fewer than a hundred people were marched into the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and danced in their own colored circle for nearly an hour as a DJ in the center spun tunes and the disembodied voice of David Byrne offered movement suggestions. For the Byzantine Choral Project’s Icons/Idols: In the Purple Room, two people at a time follow the narrative over their phone as they wander through creepy downstairs rooms at the New Ohio Theatre. And for En Garde Arts’ A Dozen Dreams, pairs make their way across twelve separate installations at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, each one containing a dream from a woman playwright.

Japan Society is entering the actorless arena with the latest iteration of writer-director Kuro Tanino’s The Dark Master, running for only sixteen performances from June 23 to 27, with a maximum of ten people at each show. A sculptor, painter, and former psychiatrist, Tanino (Frustrating Picture Book for Adults, Fortification of Smiles) created the immersive forty-five-minute piece for his experimental theater company, Niwa Gekidan Penino, but they will not be at the East Forty-Seventh St. institution; instead, the story, about the relationship between a Japanese diner and the owner-chef of a restaurant and inspired by an indie manga and first-person video games, takes place through Virtual Reality headsets and headphones, along with live onstage cooking to add smell and taste to hearing and seeing. The work was first presented in 2003 with a full cast and audience and has now been reimagined for the pandemic.

The Dark Master takes place for only ten people at a time at Japan Society (photo © Keizo Maeda)

“Niwa Gekidan Penino generated significant buzz in their 2014 U.S. debut at Japan Society with The Room Nobody Knows,” artistic director Yoko Shioya said in a statement. “With this new presentation, I hope to further their status and reputation in this country. We are extremely happy to welcome audiences back into our building for Kuro’s innovative and immersive in-person VR performance. From its intimate scale to the sensorial nature of the piece — along with its haunting and thrilling plot — this one-of-a-kind theater event seems tailor made for our return to live, onsite theater.” With only 160 total tickets available, you better act fast if you want to experience what should be a wild and special show.

AFROFEMONONOMY / WORK THE ROOTS

AFROFEMONONOMY / WORK THE ROOTS
Performance Space New York and other locations
150 First Ave.
May 15 – June 27, free with RSVP
performancespacenewyork.org
www.instagram.com/afrofemononomy

A multidisciplinary collaboration by some of today’s preeminent Black women creators, “Afrofemononomy / Work the Roots” features live theater, music, discussion, and installation, inspired by the career of activist, author, poet, playwright, editor, director, filmmaker, educator, and mother Kathleen Collins (Losing Ground, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?), who died of breast cancer in 1988 at the age of forty-six.

According to the collective, “‘Afrofemononomy / Work the Roots’ is an affirmation of how we, as Black women, expected to maintain the world’s health, can restore and not imperil our own. Black women absorb disproportionate stress and often develop a variety of risk factors, including higher early mortality rates with cancer and other diseases. Working inside the unsustainable economy and time structures of theater-making are often depleting for us. ‘Afrofemononomy / Work the Roots’ is a Black femme reclaiming of time and space, a model for restoration, a continuation of the lineage of our foremothers’ formative presence in the downtown avant-garde. We claim our health and sovereignty, prioritizing our human needs, and translate the ease, free expression, and non-compulsory ethos of our informal gatherings to our working conditions and aesthetic.”

The six-week celebration, produced by Performance Space New York with New Georges, kicks off this weekend with Collins’s 1984 Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One-Acts, which is having its theatrical world premiere at Oakland Theater Project later this month. Part of the Downtown Live festival, Remembrance, a kind of personal séance starring Eisa Davis and Kaneza Schaal and with directorial consultation by Jackie Sibblies Drury, takes place at 85 Broad St. on May 16 at 6:30, May 22 at 1:30 and 4:00, and May 23 at 4:00, in an arcade next to the Stone Street Historic District. Those same days at 2:30 and 3:45, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Amelia Workman, Kara Young, Gabby Beans, and Jennifer Harrison Newman will present The Reading in the Courtyard at 122CC, Performance Space New York’s home, a tale set in a psychic’s waiting room with a white novelist and a Black fashion designer.

Begin the Beguine unfolds May 15 and 16 on a lawn in East Harlem, performed by April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson about an actress mother and her adult son and created with Charlotte Brathwaite, and The Healing is set in a Bed-Stuy park May 15-16 with Joie Lee, Schaal and Drury, as a white healer tries to help a Black woman with an unnamed illness.

In addition, Blain-Cruz’s installation “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” provides “a space for dance, rest and sustenance made for and in appreciation of Black women,” running May 15-16 and 22-23 from noon to 2:30 and 4:00 to 7:00 in the Courtyard at 122CC, and Davis’s audio-visual installation “The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste” is open Thursdays to Sundays from May 29 to June 27 from noon to 6:00 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theatre and in the Courtyard, with occasional live sound interaction that asks the question “Can you be Black and not perform?” And finally, on May 15, “Afrofemononomy” will launch an online, international, interactive radio project. All events are free but require advance RSVP for timed tickets and because of limited space.

La MaMa MOVES! DANCE FESTIVAL

Mei Yamanaka will be part of Tiffany Mills Company presentation at 2021 La Mama Moves! Dance Festival

Who: Tiffany Mills Company; Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum; J. Bouey; Morgan Bullock, Gerald Casel, Daudi Fayar, BamBam Frost, and John Scott; Ricarrdo Valentine/Brother(hood) Dance!; Jasmine Hearn; Sugar Vendil; more
What: Digital and in-person dance festival
Where: La MaMa online and at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega
When: May 12–23, free – $25 (pay-what-you-can)
Why: The 2021 edition of La MaMa Moves! will be a hybrid dance festival, consisting of workshops, discussions, and performances streamed live from the Ellen Stewart Theatre and the Downstairs Theatre at its home at 66 East Fourth St. as well as held in front of a limited audience at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega at 19 East Third St. “Performing artists have always proven to be resilient and resourceful even during the most challenging times,” La MaMa Moves! curator Nicky Paraiso said in a statement. “Since the pandemic began last March, dance practitioners have been both taking time to reflect and going ahead in doing the creative work they are always doing. This past year has certainly been painful and frustrating, both mentally exhausting and physically debilitating. Dance artists have, however, continued to make work, and I believe that the artists participating in this season’s La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival are making work that is essential and true to this pivotal moment in time.”

The sixteenth annual festival kicks off May 12 with an intergenerational discussion in recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Potri Ranka Manis, Paz Tanjuaquio, and Sugar Vendil, moderated by choreographer and writer Maura Nguyen Donohue. Tiffany Mills Company will offer a Zoom workshop for kids on May 13, Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum will perform Prayer of the Morning on May 13 and 15, J. Bouey will present untitled: an exploration of grief on May 14 and 16, and Morgan Bullock, Gerald Casel, Daudi Fayar, BamBam Frost, and John Scott will participate in a Virtual International Showcase on May 18. Tiffany Mills Company will give a sneak peek at the excerpts-in-process Home Project on May 20 and 22 (with Mills, Jordan Morley, Nikolas Owens, Emily Pope, and Mei Yamanaka), Ricarrdo Valentine/Brother(hood) Dance! shares All About Love about Black healing on May 21 and 23, and, on May 22 and 23 at 4:00, La MaMa moves to the nearby Downtown Art/Alpha Omega for outdoor performances of Jasmine Hearn’s Songs from Pleasure Memory and Vendil’s Test Sites. All events require advance RSVP and are either free or pay-what-you-can ($5-$25).

BLESSED UNREST: TOUCH

Touch takes place on the sidewalk, with Madison Square Park in the background (photo by Maria Baranova)

TOUCH
Blessed Unrest; NYC Open Culture Program
Saturday, May 8, 7:00, and Sunday, May 9, 3:00 & 5:00
Admission: free with RSVP (suggested donation $25)
East 26th Street (between 5th and Madison Avenue, NYC)
www.blessedunrest.org
www1.nyc.gov

The Manhattan-based Blessed Unrest company explores our deep-seated need for physical and emotional connection in Touch, a dance-theater piece performed guerrilla-style just outside Madison Square Park. Part of the city’s Open Culture Program, the forty-five-minute work takes place on the sidewalk near the southwest corner of East Twenty-Sixth St. and Broadway, the park right behind them. Wearing masks, Michael Gene Jacobs, Tatyana Kot, Ariel Polanco, and Anna Wulfekuhle nimbly move across a long bench and interact with a lamppost, a circular bike rack, and a low railing around a tree as overlapping stories are broadcast from two small, portable speakers. The narratives, based on personal stories of isolation shared by the performers and edited and expanded by Keith Hamilton Cobb (American Moor) and Teddy Jefferson (One Inch Leather, The Insomniac), involve Oedipus, a horse, and a mysterious neighbor. The socially distanced audience, also wearing masks, stand or sit in the street, which is blocked off to vehicular traffic but not to pedestrians and bicyclists, who sometimes walk or pedal right through the performance, lending an unpredictable quality to the proceedings.

Performers make use of a bench, a bike rack, a lamppost, and more in site-specific Touch (photo by Maria Baranova)

“When we finished working on our 2015 show Body: Anatomies of Being, which was also built around personal testimonials from the performers, we felt strongly that the idea of touch hadn’t been explored fully in the final work,” director Jessica Burr (The Snow Queen, Eurydice’s Dream), who founded the company in 1999, said in a statement. “It seemed particularly fitting to revisit this subject now, as the months of detachment and related touch deprivation began to take a toll on all of us. When workshopping this piece remotely, each in our own isolated bubble, we spoke about research on mirror neurons and the emotional brain. That research suggests that our witnessing of the authentic corporeal experiences of others can stimulate the very same visceral response in our own brains, as though the experience were ours. It’s the forging of literal compassion through neural growth in our audiences.”

Touch, which features music composition, arrangement, and sound design by Adrian Bridges and costumes by Sohn Plenefisch, continues May 8 and 9; admission is free with RSVP. (There is a suggested donation of $25.) Be sure to also take a walk through Madison Square Park, where Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest, consisting of forty-nine bare trees representing impending environmental calamity, is on view through mid-November.

SIXTH ANNUAL NEW YORK OPERA FEST

New Camerata Opera’s The Brooklyn Job is one of numerous cutting-edge productions in New York Opera Fest

The New York Opera Alliance
May 1 – June 30, free – $60
newyorkoperafest.org

I have a confession to make: Everything I know about opera I learned from Warner Bros. cartoons: The Rabbit of Seville, Long-Haired Hare, What’s Opera Doc? In my nearly twenty years of covering New York City events, I’ve been to only a handful of performances at the Metropolitan Opera, and mostly because of my interest in multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge.

But during the pandemic, I discovered that there’s a vibrant, experimental side to the four-hundred-year-old classical art form. Since April 2020, I have watched several dozen operas made for Zoom, filmed onstage and in the nooks and crannies of theaters, outdoors, in virtual cities, and in a trailer by a forest. Opera Philadelphia’s Soldier Songs followed a military man with PTSD. White Snake Projects’ Alice in the Pandemic employed cutting-edge technology to send Alice into a dark, virtual wonderland. On Site Opera’s audio-only To My Distant Love presented a Beethoven song cycle over the telephone. Boston Lyric Opera’s The Fall of the House of Usher reimagined Philip Glass’s work using puppets and stop-motion animation. City Lyric Opera’s adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera featured audience participation. And HERE Arts Center’s all decisions will be made by consensus was the first Zoom opera, with performers in boxes.

So there is much to look forward to in the New York Opera Alliance’s sixth annual New York Opera Fest, which takes place online and in person through June 30, consisting of more than two dozen events that stretch the bounds of what opera can be. “This year’s festival transformed its lineup entirely due to performative restrictions,” NYOF chairwoman Megan Gillis said in a statement. “Having to reinvent itself as a virtual festival, the range of work being presented is astounding. We are pleasantly surprised to learn of so many innovative productions on tap this year, as well as the essential courage, energy, and hard work required from their respective staff members and artists. We are honored to provide this unique platform at a time when both artists and audiences are starving for live performance.”

Among the highlights of the 2021 festival, which honors bass-baritone Antoine Hodge, who died from Covid-19 on February 22 at the age of thirty-eight, are encores of Prototype’s self-guided Modulation and Times3 (Times x Times x Times), the latter a collaboration by Pamela Z and Geoff Sobelle best experienced in Times Square; On Site Opera’s The Road We Came, an immersive musical walking tour through local Black history; Heartbeat Opera’s workshop production of the Brooklyn-set futuristic dark comedy The Extinctionist; New Camerata Opera’s The Brooklyn Job, an interactive virtual museum heist in which the audience can order at-home cocktail kits and party favors; the return of HERE’s fun live serial space opera Only You Will Recognize the Signal; and Divaria Productions’ Rival Queens, about Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I.

Below is the full schedule in chronological order; all presentations are available through June 30 unless otherwise noted:

dell’Arte Opera Ensemble, “Songs from Hibernation,” winter and spring recital series on YouTube led by artistic director Chris Fecteau, through August 31, free

Divaria Productions, Rival Queens, biopic about Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I, directed by Antón Armendariz, cinematography by Fabián Jiménez Asis, and music direction by pianist Sergio Martínez Zangróniz from Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, with Ashley Bell as Mary, Anna Tonna as Elizabeth, and Michal Gizinski as the narrator, $20

Experiments in Opera, Aqua Net & Funyuns, podcast operas with music by Tariq Al-Sabir, Jason Cady, Kamala Sankaram, Aaron Siegel, and Michi Wiancko and librettos by Cady, Cara Ehlenfeldt, Annie-Sage Whitehurst, and Daniel Shepard, free

HERE Arts Center, Only You Will Recognize the Signal, serial space opera composed by Kamala Sankaram, directed by Kristin Marting, with libretto by Rob Handel, and performed by Paul An, Christopher Burchett, Hai-Ting Chinn, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones, Joan La Barbara, and Jorell Williams, $5-$50

Hunter Opera Theater, the Richard Burke Pocket Opera at Hunter College, featuring The Taxi Driver (libretto and music by Joe Young), The Blue Bird Opera: The Pursuit of Happiness (libretto and music by Alyssa Regent), Panic Room (libretto and music by Deshawn Withers), and Prince Danila Govorila (music by Matthew Sandahl, libretto by Alkiviades Meimaris), free

Lighthouse Opera, Mozart’s Die Zauberfloete (“A Distant Flute”), conducted by Stephen Francis Vasta and directed by John Tedeschi, and excerpts from Verdi’s La Traviata, free

No Dominion Theater Company, Hindsight: Behind the Lens, exploration of true crime opera based on the Leopold and Loeb case, libretto by Bea Goodwin, music by Felix Jarrar, with singers Gabriel Hernandez and Joseph Beutel, free

On Site Opera, The Road We Came, three self-guided tours of the Black history of New York City featuring works by Black composers, multimedia collaboration between On Site Opera, Ryan & Tonya McKinny’s Keep the Music Going Productions, and Harlem historian Eric K. Washington, through July 31, $60 – $165

Prototype, Modulation, multimedia self-guided exploration of isolation, identity, fear, and connection, available for download, free

Prototype, Times3 (Times x Times x Times), site-specific sonic journey through Times Square by composer Pamela Z and theatre artist Geoff Sobelle, $5 and up

Regina Opera Company, “2021 Spring Concert,” with soprano Lisa Bryce, mezzo-soprano Galina Ivannikova, tenors Lindell Carter and Hyunho Cho, and pianist Dmitry Glivinskiy, filmed in the company’s Sunset Park theater, free

New Camerata Opera, The Brooklyn Job, written and directed by Sarah Morgan Ashey, with music direction by Dan Franklin Smith, and featuring sopranos Samina Aslam and Barbara Porto, mezzo-sopranos Eva Parr, Julia Tang, and Anna Tonna, tenors Erik Bagger and Victor Khodadad, baritones Stan Lacy and Scott Lindroth, and bass Kofi Hayford, May 6 & 8, 8:00, $40-$160

Fab Fulton/ART360° and the American Opera Project, Brooklyn Cultural Tours Kick-off, self-guided audiovisual tour led by Ron Janoff, with songs by contralto Nicole Mitchell, May 8, 11:00 am, Betty Carter Park, free

Bronx Opera, Mozart’s Impresario, Zoom broadcast on YouTube, directed by Benjamin Spierman, conducted by Michael Spierman, with pianist Eric Kramer and singers Blake Friedman, Halley Gilbert, Ben Spierman, Hannah Spierman, and Jack Anderson White, May 8-9, free

The American Opera Project and the Center for Fiction, “Note/Books: The Night Falls,” libretto reading with musical excerpts, book and lyrics by Karen Russell, music and lyrics by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, choreographed and directed by Troy Schumacher, and moderated by Joseph V. Melillo, May 13, 7:30, free

Brooklyn College Conservatory, Bizet’s Carmen, directed by Isabel Milenski, with music preparation by Dmitry Glivinskiy, performed by the Brooklyn College Opera Theatre on Facebook, May 14, 7:00, and May 18, 12:30, free

Bronx Opera and Bronxnet Community Cable, “Sunday Night at the Opera,” Sundays at 7:00 beginning May 16, free

Heartbeat Opera’s The Extinctionist takes place in person and online

Victor Herbert Renaissance Project, Heart O’Mine, including the Irish drinking song “Cruiskeen Lawn,” with music by Victor Herbert and his grandfather Samuel Lover, May 16-23, $20

Beth Morrison Projects, Next Generation concert featuring rising composers, singers, and artists, streamed digitally from National Sawdust in Brooklyn, May 27, 7:00, free

AS/COA, Ebbó, opera-oratorio by composer Louis Aguirre and librettist Rafael Almanza, online production commissioned by Americas Society from Dominican artist Yelaine Rodríguez, with solo soprano Estelí Gómez, Ahmed Gómez as the narrator, Jeremy Antonio Caro as Bird and Orula, Rayser Rafelina Campusano Rosario as Queen Apetebí, Michelle Wong on oboe, David Byrd-Marrow on horns, Pala Garcia on violin, Stephanie Griffin on viola, Jacob Greenberg on piano, and Haruka Fujii and Booby Sanabria on percussion, May 28, 7:00, free

Heartbeat Opera, The Extinctionist, music by Daniel Schlosberg, libretto by Amanda Quaid, directed, conceived, and developed by Louisa Proske, semistaged sneak peek at show about a potential Brooklyn apocalypse, with four singers and four multi-instrumentalists, performed live with a socially distanced audience and streamed online from PS21 in Chatham, New York, May 29, 7:30, and May 30, 3:00, $5

Little Opera Theater of NY, “Monteverdi & Other Treasures from the Seicento,” featuring Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, composed by Claudio Monteverdi, and music of the era by Barbara Strozzi and Dario Costello, with tenor Raúl Melo as the Narrator, music director Elliot Figg on harpsichord, violinists Manami Mizumoto and Rebecca Nelson, violist Majka Demcak, theorbist and guitarist Paul Morton, and viol de gamba and bassist Doug Balliett, livestreamed from St. John’s in the Village, June 4, 7:30, $5-$50

SAS Performing Arts Company and Studios, “A Night at the Opera,” music by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, and Strauss, performed by members of SAS Performing Arts Concert Opera, June 5-12, 7:30, $15

Professional Women Singers Association, songs dealing with the current crisis, June 6-30, free

The American Opera Project, “Sing Together, Children!,” created and hosted by soprano Adrienne Danrich, with the Music as the Message (MaM) choir and Q&A, June 13, 4:00, free

EXQUISITE CORPSE COMPANY: ZOETROPE

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.