Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place was inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone (photo by Maria Baranova)
THE OTHER PLACE
The Shed’s Griffin Theater
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, $24-$124 theshed.org
British dramatist Alexander Zeldin follows up his staggering 2023 Love at Park Ave. Armory, about the homeless crisis being experienced by English citizens and refugees, with the intense dysfunctional-family drama The Other Place at the Shed’s Griffin Theater, in which he explores the many forms of grief.
The play is set in the present day, in a lavish home amid a major renovation. It’s been ten years since successful businessman Chris’s (Tobias Menzies) brother, Adam, died, and Chris has decided that it is time to scatter Adam’s ashes in a garden in St. Margaret’s Park. Chris’s wife, Erica (Lorna Brown); their son, Leni (Lee Braithwaite); Chris’s best friend and contractor, Tez (Jerry Killick); and Chris’s niece, Issy (Ruby Stokes), are all waiting for Issy’ sister, Annie (Emma D’Arcy), to join them. Annie and Issy are Adam’s daughters, and Annie has been long estranged from the family, facing her own demons. She is particularly at odds with her uncle Chris, who she believes has wrongly usurped her father’s estate and exploited her delicate mental health. When Annie arrives, there is almost instant conflict.
Annie believes her father’s ashes should remain in the house that he loved, and she goes to extremes to prevent the scattering from happening.
“Are you unwell again?” Chris asks her, continuing, “Are you on medication? . . . I paid for a very expensive psychiatrist —” Annie shoots back, “Didn’t ask you to.”
Soon the two are cursing at each other as they fight over the ashes, with Issy caught in the middle, Erica upset with what’s happening, Leni paying little attention, and Terry trying to calm everyone down. And it only gets worse when Annie decides to sleep in a tent in the backyard, under the tree where her father hanged himself.
Sisters Issy (Ruby Stokes) and Annie (Emma D’Arcy) fight for the family legacy in The Other Place (photo by Maria Baranova)
The eighty-minute play is loosely inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, the Greek tragedy about honor and shame involving sisters Antigone and Ismene; their brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, who were killed on opposite sides of a civil war; and their uncle Creon, who becomes king and declares that while Eteocles will receive a hero’s burial, Polynices’s body will be left to decay in the desert in disgrace, a fate Antigone refuses to accept and the blind prophet Tiresias predicts will be a mistake. (The siblings’ parents were Oedipus and Jocasta, who suffered their own horrible deaths.)
Writer-director Zeldin (Beyond Caring,Faith Hope and Charity) makes few specific references to Antigone, although he gives the characters names that start with the same letter as in Sophocles’s classic, but several of the underlying themes are the same, from family responsibility and legacy to pride and loyalty. At the center is the fraught relationship between Chris and Annie and how it affects the others, leading to a shocking twist, followed by a tragic conclusion.
“What I think is there are people who are suffering and you can’t go through your life as if they aren’t there and you don’t help them. If everyone did that, what kind of world would that be?” Erica asks early on. “Euh, like this one,” Leni responds. “That’s funny,” Annie says. “Thanks, Leni,” Chris adds sarcastically.
Rosanna Vize’s set is an open living room and kitchen, with newly installed sliding glass doors in the back that both reflect the actors and provide views of the forestlike backyard, depending on the positioning of a large, overhead rectangular lightbox that at one point rotates until it magically disappears. (The lighting is by James Farncombe; Vize also designed the contemporary costumes.) Josh Anio Grigg’s sound features one unnecessary jump scare while regularly competing with Yannis Philippakis’s original synthesizer score, which ranges from an ominous, ghostly drone to more cinematic flourishes that can become intrusive.
The play was written specifically for D’Arcy (House of the Dragon,Bluets), who is fearless as Annie, who resents having to return home but feels the need to protect what was hers and her father’s. Menzies (Outlander,The Hunt) is an excellent foil as the dark, determined Chris, who wants to finally move on from his brother’s death, exemplified by the changes he is making to the inside and outside of the house, rebuilding the family psyche.
Stokes (The Habits,Till the Stars Come Down) provides solid support as Issy, who finds herself in a bad situation with no easy way out. Braithwaite’s (Pinocchio,Laughing Boy) and Brown’s (Two Ladies,Wings) characters are underdeveloped and feel extraneous, while Killick (The Confessions,Bloody Mess) does what he can with Tez, who seems to be in a different play. (Perhaps that’s “the other place” in the otherwise unclear title?)
When Erica declares, “Sorry, it’s just such a mess, the bloody builders. Honestly it’s a been a warzone in here, like Iraq or I don’t know!,” she’s not referring only to the renovation. A few minutes later, Annie says, “More people are harmed from within the family than outside of it. That’s literally a fact.” Meanwhile, Issy keeps up hope, telling everyone, “The scattering will be healing and we can all come back here and have years of peace.”
But as Creon says in Antigone, “To yield is grievous, but the obstinate soul / That fights with Fate, is smitten grievously.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Elevator Repair Service adaptation of Ulysses is fun frolic through 1920 masterpiece (photo by Joan Marcus)
ULYSSES
The Public Theater, Martinson Hall
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $109 www.publictheater.org www.elevator.org
Who knew that Ulysses was such raunchy fun? Certainly not me, who, like many others, have cracked open but never fully read James Joyce’s 1920 masterpiece.
Since 1991, the downtown avant-garde theater troupe Elevator Repair Service has been staging unique adaptations, from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Chekhov’s The Seagull to Euripides’s The Bacchae and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The daring company now continues its reinterpretations of classic literature, which include William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,The Select (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises), and Gatz, an eight-hour extravaganza featuring every single word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with a frisky frolic through what is considered to be one of the greatest books ever written.
“Hello and welcome to Ulysses,” longtime ERS cast member and codirector Scott Shepherd announces at the beginning. “Get ready. As one critic said, not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine.” Shepherd prepares the audience by explaining that Joyce purposely filled the novel with enigmas and puzzles and experimental turns, writing many chapters in different styles, in order to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing about what he meant, and that’s how he would insure his immortality. And like many things Joyce said, it’s a joke, but also not a joke, because here we are, more than a hundred years later, and the professors are still arguing.”
The set, by the collective known as dots, is centered by a long table in the front, where seven actors playing forty characters often sit before getting up and participating in absurdist scenes. A clock on a far wall keeps track of the time, which goes back and forth on Thursday, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Shepherd and codirector John Collins have trimmed the story down to a lean 165 minutes with intermission; whenever they skip a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages, the words are speedily projected on the table and/or wall, initially accompanied by screeching sounds that eventually calm down a bit as the actors grab on to the table, as if the time jumps have them holding on for dear life.
Dr Malachi Mulligan (Scott Shepherd) examines “bisexually abnormal” asylum escapee Dr Bloom (Vin Knight) in Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)
The narrative consists of eighteen episodes, from “Telemachus” and “Nestor” to “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” reimagining Homer’s eighth-century BC saga The Odyssey, adding references to King Lear and Hamlet. The action travels from Eccles St., Essex Bridge, and the post office to Davy Byrne’s pub, the library, and the Ormond Hotel, following the (mis)adventures of protagonist Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight), a simple man married to Marion, also known as Molly (Maggie Hoffman), a singer who is having an affair with her goofy manager, Blazes Boylan (Shepherd), who struts around with his silly locks of hair spewing out from under his straw hat, and Stephen Dedalus (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), who previously appeared in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and returns here as a deeply pensive history professor mourning the loss of his mother (Stephanie Weeks) while avoiding his father, Simon (Kate Benson).
Among the other figures who pop in and out of the less-than-neatly-laid-out plot are university students Armstrong (Dee Beasnael) and Haines (Benson), Dr Punch Costello (Weeks), the expert spitter known as the citizen (Benson), newspaper editor Myles Crawford (Benson), antisemitic headmaster Mr Deasy (Knight), pub gossipers Joe Hynes (Stevenson) and John Wyse Nolan (Weeks), Nosey Flynn (Weeks) from Dubliners, and medical student Buck Mulligan (Shepherd), who is the subject of Joyce’s beloved opening: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”
Don’t try to get caught up in the plot, as it’s not the point, although Odyssey fans are likely to spot numerous similarities between Homer’s and Joyce’s characters; instead, Ulysses, in the book and in this vastly entertaining ERS staging, is about human consciousness and the love of language, with tongues firmly in cheeks. Exquisite verbiage pours forth at any moment — “Ah! Godblazeqrukbrukarchkrasht!” Boylan declares to Marion, who responds, “O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?” — as well as spectacular, unforgettable lines, such as when Stephen says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Also showing up are such fab phrases as “the scrotumtightening sea,” “ineluctable modality of the visible [and the audible],” “Shut your eyes and see,” “the incipient intimations of proximate dawn,” and “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” Oh, and let’s not forget “He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”
Here is an exemplary passage, the narration divided between two of the performers:
SW: Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. KB: He liked thick giblet soup, SW: nutty gizzards, KB: a stuffed roast heart, SW: liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, KB: fried hencods’ roes. SW: Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight) takes a gander at the dirty Sweets of Sin in ERS adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)
“The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it,” Joyce told Djuna Barnes in a 1922 interview for Vanity Fair. “In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious — but as for psychoanalysis, it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.”
ERS takes that spirit and runs with it, from Enver Chakartash’s playful costumes, Marika Kent’s mischievous lighting, and Ben Williams’s brash sound to Matthew Deinhart’s text projections and Patricia Marjorie’s hilarious props, which range from paper airplanes to doll babies. The six actors hit just the right note throughout as they switch in an instant from one character to narrator to another character, never missing a beat.
You don’t have to have read the book or seen Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation to understand what is going on, since nothing happens, and everything. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the wild, unpredictable shenanigans as ERS celebrates another literary treasure as only it can.
As Stephen says early on, “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
CHAIN WINTER ONE-ACT FESTIVAL
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
February 5 – March 1, live and virtual, $24–$35 www.chaintheatre.org
The Chain Winter One-Act Festival is back with an impressive lineup of plays through March 1, featuring twenty-eight programs consisting of between two and four works totaling sixty to eighty minutes. Soap opera fans will be especially excited, as many of the participants come from that genre (As the World Turns,All My Children,One Life to Live,Falcon Crest).
This year is highlighted by Jeryl Brunner’s Sweet Tart, directed by two-time Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg and starring Emmy nominee Ralph Macchio and his daughter, Julia Macchio, who played Vanessa on Cobra Kai.Sweet Tart is on a can’t-miss bill with Lyle Kessler’s Shit Kickers, starring two-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Carol Kane and Margaret Ladd, and John Arthur Long’s The Fusion Experiment, with David Rey and Christina Elise Perry, helmed by Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski. [Ed. note: It was announced on February 23 that Carol Kane will no longer be appearing in Shit Kickers; she will be replaced by Sachi Parker.]
“We don’t do safe — we do real,” Gostkowski said in a statement. “This is where audiences and artists meet on equal ground to explore the world as it is, and imagine what it could be.”
Two-time Obie-winning playwright José Rivera presents the world premiere of the fabulously titled Look What Crashed through the Portal and Ended up in Brooklyn, Emmy winner Jennifer Pepperman writes and directs Ray, David Zayas Jr. directs Diego Aguirre, Joseph Russo, and Jacob Lumet Cannavale in Aguirre’s Stalled, and three-time Emmy winner Cady McClain takes the lead in three-time Emmy-winning director Christopher Goutman’s The Oblique. Other shows to watch out for are Annabel McConnachie’s Waiting for Gadot, Sarah Swift’s True Crime, John Corins’s Brad Pitt and the Exploding Head, and Melanie Acampora’s Too Much Fondant.
General admission tickets begin at $24; if it’s too cold for you to venture outside, four of the programs will be livestreamed.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Abbey Lee and Owen Teague star as a couple seeking escape from the world in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)
BLACKOUT SONGS
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 28, $59-$129 www.blackoutsongs.com
“I spoke about wings / You just flew / I wondered, I guessed, and I tried / You just knew / I sighed / But you swooned / I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon,” Mike Scott sings in the 1985 Waterboys tune “The Whole of the Moon.” The propulsive song appears several times in Joe White’s scintillating, Olivier-nominated Blackout Songs.
Running at the Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater through February 28, the show stars Owen Teague and Abbey Lee as an initially unnamed American college student studying painting and a free-spirited British wannabe poet who meet at their first AA meeting. While she looks stylish in jeans, a faux fur coat, a belly-revealing shirt, and sunglasses, he is ragged and unsteady, with torn pants and a denim jacket. (The costumes are by Avery Reed.) He speaks in a stammer, wearing a neck brace that he can’t explain.
Finding a tooth in her pocket, she says, “Some people might (panic), you know, but my brain, my brain’s just gone ‘pfff, don’t worry about it.’ Gone. And that’s — Well, that’s what, exactly? That’s mercy, isn’t it? This is what mercy looks like, you go out, get pissed, get hurt, fall in love, whatever, doesn’t matter, in the morning it’s gone anyway, new day — do you know you’re shaking?” He doesn’t.
That opening sets the stage for the rest of the play, in which the two alcoholics fall in and out of love, disappear for extended periods, and remember and forget significant parts of their toxic relationship. They are both completely right and completely wrong for each other; you can’t help but root for them even when it’s clear they are caught on a dangerous downward spiral, unable to avoid the “medicine” they still think can help them. They role-play, attend a funeral, and dance in a bar, as beautiful moments intersect with bad decisions. One night, when he shows up bleeding from the mouth, she says, “I think it’s sexy, actually. Desperately romantic. You’re so doomed, aren’t you.” He later professes, “There’s no life without you.”
They exist in an amorphous time and space, where no one else is ever around, just the two of them reveling in and falling prey to their inner demons. When she talks about her father, who essentially abandoned her when she was six, he asks, “Don’t you think you’re memorable? Is that what you think — Cos he — Cos he sent you away, that means he tried to forget you?” She responds, “OK, alright, thanks, Dr. Freud, but I’m done here — Let’s go get a drink.”
The past and the present intertwine as the man and the woman contemplate their future, minute by minute, depending on what they can remember.
Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting nearly steals the show in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)
Blackout Songs unfolds in a mostly empty space designed by three-time Tony winner Scott Pask, with a small pub table on one side against the wall, a folding table with coffee and snacks on the other, and a church pulpit near a far corner, next to large windows that later reveal a glowing cross. In the first scene, the woman is convincing the man to leave the meeting and get some medicine; looking directly at the audience, she says to him, “Don’t look at them,” as if we’re not only watching the play but are also fellow recovering addicts at the meeting — and we have no right to judge them because we all have our failings.
The concept of the moon is a theme throughout the story; in addition to the Waterboys song, the man recalls the beauty of the moon when showing the woman one of his paintings, and he later says, “Won’t forget this, will you. Full moon, holy wine, it’s like a song or something. You know the world is different under a full moon? People are. People fall in love. Cos it pulls liquid around, doesn’t it. Tides. And there’s liquid in us too. Blood and. Other liquids. Chemicals. The brain is the moistest organ in the body. Moon drunk is different.”
Brian Hickey’s striking sound and original music and Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting — almost a character unto itself — help define the shifts in time to startling effect. The production, under Rory McGregor’s (The Wasp,Buggy Baby) expert direction, evokes such other complex works as Nick Payne’s Constellations, in which a couple’s relationship constantly changes in the quantum multiverse, Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm, about an unnamed man and woman whose intense passion leads them on mysterious mini-adventures, and David Ives’s Venus in Fur, in which a theater director and an actor turn an audition into a reality-bending treatise on gender, sexuality, and degradation, as well as Blake Edwards’s 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, about a married couple who trap themselves in a haze of alcohol. (McGregor directed Tender Napalm at Theaterlab in late 2024, with a crew that included Reed, Hickey, and Derosier.)
Blackout Songs boasts a trio of firsts: Two-time Olivier nominee White’s (The Little Big Things,Mayfly) and Lee’s (Florida Man,Black Rabbit) American stage debuts and Teague’s (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,You Hurt My Feelings) US debut. Lee is a force of nature in the play, her character never slowing down, always on the move, while Teague lends a sensitive air to the man, who thinks he knows what he wants but keeps making choices that hold him back. It’s a beguiling, heart-wrenching ninety-minute pas de deux as two lost souls try to find love and escape together.
The play does have a hard time figuring out how to end, but by then you’ll be so entranced by the two characters, and the two actors, that you won’t mind, especially if you’re addicted to good theater.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
There are no actors on hand but the Mabou Mines production of All That Fall boasts a magnificent set (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Space is the place,” Sun Ra sang on the title track of his 1973 album, Space Is the Place. “There’s no limit to the things that you can do. . . . And your life is worthwhile.”
The jazz legend might have been referring to the cosmos, but one of the (many) things that makes my life worthwhile is entering a theater with no idea what to expect visually. I’m not talking about standard setups where the proscenium stage is in front of rows of affixed seats but rooms that can be reshaped and reconfigured in multiple ways. For example, I am filled with anticipation every time I walk into Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, the Shed’s McCourt, BAM Fisher, and the Signature’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, all of which can be transformed into fascinating rearrangements.
Below are four recent shows I’ve seen that offered unique spatial experiences.
The cast of All That Fall does not appear in person at the 122 Community Center (photos by Jeri Coppola)
UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–25, $20-$50 www.maboumines.org utrfest.org
Since 1970, the experimental avant-garde Mabou Mines troupe has been challenging the boundaries of theater, and they do it again with their adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play, All That Fall. When audience members get off the elevator at the 122 Community Center, they encounter a series of objects in the hallway and a side room that prepare them for the show: a photo of the Orangedale train station next to a radio playing a Big Band–era instrumental; a poster of a railway man’s “hand, flag and lamp signals” with an actual rusty lamp; a photo of the train station interior, with empty benches, which hints at what we’ll soon see; horse-racing information; and a piece of paper with the opening quote from Beckett’s 1938 novel, Murphy, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” along with a drawing of a tree by Harry Bliss with the caption “A tree greeting the morning sun, because it has no choice.”
Inside the theater, the seats are arranged in a traditional manner, but the set is like an art installation, a large model of a miniature town with tiny houses, bumpy hills, rocky streets, a river, two bridges, hens near the tracks, and an elevated train station, all surrounded by a map on the walls; in the back are regular-size remnants, an abandoned bicycle and parts of some kind of moving vehicle. In front of the model, a man is projecting slides on an old carousel of costumed men and women — the characters the actors will be portraying. Shortly after the projections stop and the man leaves, we realize that there will be no actors for us to watch; in true radio-play fashion, they will only be heard, prerecorded, but we now know what they look like.
The narrative is fairly straightforward: Mrs Maddy Rooney (Randy Danson) is worried when her blind husband, Dan (Tony Torn), is late getting home. She finds out that the ever-dependable train has not arrived yet, and she is concerned why. Along her journey, she meets up with Christy the carter (Jesse Lenat), Mr Barrell the station master (Lenat), Mr Tyler the retired bill collector (Steven Rattazzi), Mr Slocum the racecourse manager (Torn), Tommy the railway porter (Tẹmídayọ Amay), the pious Miss Fitt (Wendy vanden Heuvel), the little girl Dolly (Lila Blue), and the little boy Jerry (Sylvan Schneiderman). They have absurdist conversations about dung, the Matterhorn, damnation, sex, bicycles and vans, the Titanic and the Lusitania, and “the horrors of home life.”
Mrs Rooney’s dialogue is filled with lovely snippets about human existence: “What kind of a country is this where a woman can’t weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!” she complains to Mr Tyler. “Christ what a planet,” she declares to Miss Fitt. “I do not exist,” she says to Tommy. “I am not half alive nor anything approaching it,” she explains to Mr Tyler. “Have you no respect for misery?”
The breathtaking set is by Thomas Dunn, lit by Jennifer Tipton, with a bevy of sound effects by Bruce Odland, from animal noises to a storm that shakes your seat almost like Sensurround. Mabout Mines cofounder JoAnne Akalaitis directs with a wry sense of humor.
Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber revive David Gordon’s Times Four for its fiftieth anniversary (photo by Maria Baranova)
LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85 newyorklivearts.org
In May 1977, husband-and-wife dancers David Gordon and Valda Setterfield performed their 1975 piece, Times Four in the SoHo loft where they lived and worked. Their son-in-law, Wally Cardona, has brought their little-seen pas d’deux back for a fiftieth-anniversary tribute, teaming up with Molly Lieber to re-create it from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, taking place in the same loft. It is like a 1960s happening: The limited seating is a single row of folding chairs around the periphery of the otherwise empty room; in addition, the night I attended, there were numerous familiar choreographers and dancers in the audience, all greeting one another. There is no score; the only sounds are Cardona’s (Interventions,The Set Up) and Lieber’s (Rude World,Gloria) breathing and their feet and other body parts touching the floor, sometimes landing softly, sometimes hard. They stare at the walls and windows, rarely making eye contact with the audience, as they glide primarily in unison to four beats, then deleting one move and replacing it with another.
Concentrating mostly on their legs and feet, they move forward, backward, sideways, lifting here, pounding there, almost always in unison. They fall to the ground, extend their bodies, come within inches of the audience. When slight differences occur, you can feel it in your bones. You never know which direction they are going to turn in, resulting in a thrilling suspense to it all.
They both exert remarkable strength as they perform difficult maneuvers, their muscles rippling, sweat forming. It’s a compelling feat of human endurance that last about sixty tense, exhilarating minutes. A poem associated with the dance explains, “well worn wood floor / smooth burnished brown / the kind of floor that begs to be danced on / that wants to seduce me out of my shoes and socks. . . . I face my back to the windows / I imagine 1975.”
Consider me seduced.
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)
PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18 www.bam.org www.prototypefestival.org
In September 2006, experimental avant-garde legend Richard Foreman and composer Michael Gordon debuted their surreal post-rock opera, What to wear, at the Redcat in LA. It took twenty years, but the show has finally made it to New York at the BAM Strong Harvey Theater as part of the Prototype festival, in its first-ever revival. To prepare everyone for what awaited inside the theater, in the lobby was Foreman’s detailed original concept design model for the complex, fabulously overstuffed stage, a kind of mind-blowing melding of Monty Python, Pablo Picasso, and Alice in Wonderland. It is thrilling to walk into the Harvey and see how that set has been painstakingly re-created at full size by Michael Darling, like magic; Darling also did the props, and the wild costumes are again by E. B. Brooks. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson direct, honoring the 2006 production, which you can watch online here.
The show begins with fancy lighting coming down from the ceiling as a giant cartoonish duck emerges from a doorway and the deep voice of Richard Foreman booms from the heavens: “As of this moment, this ugly duckling is now effectively banished from the realm of the oh so beautiful people.” The duck exits, and sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo sing, “This is Mad’line X” eight times, then adding, “In a terrible world / One unpleasant world / Such a bad, bad world.” Over the next sixty-plus minutes, those four are joined by St. Vincent, an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers, and the seven-piece Bang on a Can orchestra caged in one corner as the story goes through such chapters as “Mad’line X, who understands now,” “So sad but I reject you,” and “When a duck enters a fine restaurant.”
Marchers in kilts hold signs with a big X on them, a pointing finger drops down from above like the hand of G-d, skulls abound, headpieces feature little colored balls on top, a character walks around in a barrel, golf clubs become weapons, a head is locked in a box, and cool wizardry occurs just about everywhere. The unsatisfying ending does not diminish the triumph of this engaging revival. We are told that “Madeline X lives in this terrible world,” but any world that includes works by Foreman can’t be all bad.
AN ARK
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $45 theshed.org
“Don’t panic. Don’t be scared. This must feel strange to you. It felt strange to me,” an unnamed character played by Sir Ian McKellen says at the beginning of British playwright Simon Stephens’s An Ark, continuing at the Shed through March 1.
Too late.
In the summer of 2021, Stephens’s Blindness was reimagined for the pandemic, presented at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square, where a maximum of eighty-six masked and blindfolded people were seated in chairs in pods of two, either facing the same or opposite directions, each couple at least six feet away from other pairs. Everyone listened to the play, about a spreading virus that leads to chaos, through individual binaural headphones; the prerecorded narrative was performed by Juliet Stevenson.
In the summer of 2023, Tin Drum brought Kagami to the Shed’s Griffin Theater, which began with a historical multimedia installation that led to a mixed-reality concert in which everyone put on specially designed optically transparent devices that made it appear that the late pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto was playing live, enveloped in augmented reality art. In actuality, the room was completely empty except for a row of chairs along the perimeter where audience members could sit and watch, although it was much better to walk around and get up close and personal with Sakamoto — you could even go right through him.
The prep for the show is mind-bogglingly annoying. The audience is encouraged to arrive at least fifteen or twenty minutes before showtime in order to check their coats and bags, which is mandatory; however, the line was so long when we go there that we were advised to just bring our stuff in with us. At the Griffin, a sign announced, “wipe your feet / check your glasses / store your shoes / enter through the curtain / find a seat / put on your headset / sit back / enjoy the ride.” There was no curtain; the open doorway revealed a large room with plush red carpeting, a giant glowing orb hanging in the center from the ceiling, and three circular rows of chairs with a pathway through the middle. While my guest waited for corrective lenses — glasses won’t work with the headset — I took off my shoes and jacket, placed them on the floor, and tried to grab a specific seat, then come back and store my garb in one of the small cubby-hole benches, but I was told by a guide that I couldn’t do that; first I had to put the shoes and coat away, then someone would guide me to a chair. The shoes fit in the little cubby, but I had to really force the coat into another slot, only to be told that I had placed them in the wrong bench and had to move them. By then, my guest was already seated — with her jacket, which she was allowed to keep on her lap, and bag, which she could put under her chair.
Mixed reality An Ark at the shed is a confusing jumble (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Next, you put on the headsets, and four white holographic chairs appear in front of you; mine had to be adjusted by a guide because the chairs were enormous and floating in the ether. I was disappointed that I could also see everyone else in the room, which detracted from the personal nature of the show, even though theater is usually meant to be a communal experience. Then, guides wheeled the cubby benches straight through the middle of the theater and out the curtain on the other side of the room, further disturbing the alternate reality that was being created. As the play proper began, with the four characters, all barefoot and wearing white, entering the space and sitting down, it was hard not to wonder why the floor had to be carpeted and why we had had to take off our shoes; perhaps it was some kind of ASMR thing.
For forty-seven minutes, the actors perform just for you, making intense direct eye contact, reaching out with their hands, and using the second person as they recount multiple versions of a life, from birth, childhood, and adolescence to adulthood, the senior years, and death. For example: “At school you work hard but you never really feel like you belong,” “You’ll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here,” and “You get on first name terms with your pharmacist.” The dialogue is filled with detailed descriptions of objects and scenarios that involve all five senses; while poetic, they don’t propel the plot, which remains mysterious through the end.
Recorded in one take and directed by Sarah Frankcom (Our Town,Punk Rock) with sound by Ben and Max Ringham, set and costumes by Rosanna Vize, and lighting by Seth Reiser, An Ark has numerous beautiful moments, and the interaction between the characters and you can be utterly chilling (Sir Ian McKellen is only a few feet away!); when Sheehy reached a hand out to me, I reached back, attempting to grasp it.
But too much of it was confusing and unnecessary; I’m eager to see where the technology goes. Hopefully the kinks will be smoothed out and creators will have more faith in the story itself, without all the bells, whistles, and rules.
As McKellen says early on, “When this is over . . . things will have changed forever.” Well, hopefully not too much.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On January 26, they are following that up with “We the People: An Assembly of New York Artists,” a town-hall-style gathering at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery where the focus will be more local. The panel features Classical Theatre of Harlem producing artistic director Ty Jones, award-winning playwright and performer Lisa Kron (Fun Home,Well), the People’s Theatre executive artistic director and cofounder Mino Lora, former Creatives Rebuild New York executive director Sarah Calderon, New York Philharmonic vice president of education and community engagement Gary A. Padmore, and playwright and author Sara Farrington (CasablancaBox,A Trojan Woman). Farrington, who writes the indispensable Substack Theater Is Hard, will make her way through the audience with a microphone, giving members of the community the chance to speak their mind for sixty seconds (and maybe more); it is pointed out that “everyone who comes will already know that art is good, so be specific.”
The presentation will be recorded for online viewing, and a detailed report will be sent to Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. Attendance is free with advance RSVP, although it is all dependent on the weather.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Juxtapose brings the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell to life (photo by Leah Huete)
JUXTAPOSE
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 25, $44 www.59e59.org
“Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime,” Nyack-born artist Joseph Cornell wrote. “The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets — a connotation of moon and tides — the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy.”
Or, as a character declares in Happenstance Theater’s Juxtapose: A Theatrical Shadow Box, which advertises itself as being inspired by the art of Cornell and the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jacques Tati, “Sacre bleu! What a mess.”
You can say that again.
You have to look hard to find those art and film references in the final product, a confusing seventy-five minutes in which five actors wander around an abstract rooming house doing odd, repetitive things that don’t make much sense, psychologically or geographically. They consist of an unnamed collector (Mark Jaster), concierge Rosabelle (Sabrina Selma Mandell), Spilleth, a bird-woman who falls from the sky and through the roof (Gwen Grastorf), Étoile, a ballerina (Sarah Olmsted Thomas), and Blue, a childlike juggler-magician (Alex Vernon). The set and props, by Vernon and codirectors Jaster and Mandell, are centered by a large, empty white frame that is occasionally filled with various objects, from a laundry clothing line and a ladder to a window and a white scrim on which a circular image is projected. The stage also includes an old phonograph, a coat rack, a wrapped package, a conch shell, and a globe. Étoile makes weird noises when she locks and unlocks her door. Blue bounces a ball. The collector toys with his hat. Rosabelle puts on a scratchy record. Étoile tries on a new costume. Spilleth — well, I’m not sure what she does.
Among the Cornell works that served as inspiration were Observatory: Corona Borealis Casement,Toward the Blue Peninsula, and Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire, but the show never fully captures the surreal nature of Cornell’s constructions, the quirky atmosphere of Jeunet’s films (Amélie,Delicatessen), or the comic genius of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot (Mon Oncle,Playtime). However, the soundtrack is a highlight, featuring songs by Irving Berlin, J. S. Bach, Hoagy Carmichael, George Frideric Handel, and Jacques Offenbach.
When the pandemic lockdown took effect, Happenstance reimagined the in-progress piece as Juxtapose Tenement, an interactive website in which you click on each character’s key to enter their unique shadow box and follow their narratives. I found that far more charming, inventive, and engaging than what is brought to life onstage, which failed to stir the audience the night I saw the play.
If this whets your appetite for more Cornell online, it’s worth checking out The House on Utopia Parkway, Wes Anderson’s Paris re-creation of the artist’s Queens studio; interestingly, Cornell never left America, and he traveled outside New York only to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
