Tag Archives: Brian Mendes

UNDER THE RADAR: FIELD OF MARS

Richard Maxwell’s Field of Mars explores the history of human existence from an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (photo by Whitney Browne)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

“OMG.”

That three-letter digital exclamation is said throughout Richard Maxwell’s new play, Field of Mars, stated plainly by several characters as if it is just another article or preposition. As has been Maxwell’s style since he started his company, New York City Players, in 1999, all words are given similar treatment, delivered dryly, sans any deep emotion, all of equal weight and meaning. omg.

Named after an ancient term for a large public space or military parade ground, Field of Mars is about the beginning and the end of everything on Earth, with God himself portrayed by Phil Moore, who, with equal weight and meaning, also plays a manager at an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which serves as a kind of way station for humanity.

The audience sits on four rows of rafters onstage, facing the actors, in the otherwise empty NYU Skirball Center, which commissioned the piece for the Public’s Under the Radar Festival. The nonlinear story takes place on lighting designer Sascha van Riel’s relaxing set, a relatively featureless restaurant booth on one side, a bar/hostess station on the other, where Gillian Walsh is an alternate version of St. Peter at the gates of heaven, more concerned with her cover band and her BF than the future of the planet. The set is reminiscent of the one van Riel built and gets torn down in Maxwell’s The Evening, identified in that 2015 work as “a garbagey void” in “a lonely corner of the universe.”

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher rehearse for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

The show opens with Adam (Brian Mendes) and Eve (Walsh) in the Garden of Eden, disguised as a popular American chain eatery, and moves through various bizarre, seemingly unconnected scenarios involving music, invisible food, both evolution and creationism, and one hell of an orgy.

In the lengthiest segment, an early version of which I saw at the Clemente and is now more fully formed, two older musicians (Jim Fletcher and Mendes, the latter in his trademark Jerry Garcia T) are pitching their new song to a pair of younger producers (Nicholas Elliott and James Moore), one of whom is, well, an asshole who claims that punk rock never existed. The men’s long, Don DeLillo–like list of cool bands could have used some shortening — the play is too long at two and a half hours, with intermission — but Maxwell (The Vessel, Isolde, Paradiso) is not in a hurry here.

Characters in Kaye Voyce’s everyday costumes walk and squiggle slowly, the narrator (Tory Vazquez) has an extensive phone conversation about pigments with what sounds like a chatbot, early humans (Elliott, James Moore, Eleanor Hutchins, and Paige Martin) evolve, and three of the musicians, after discussing what their songs are really about, lamely “jam” on electric guitars, which are not plugged into amps, as life goes on around them. Meanwhile, the Applebee’s employees (Walsh, Moore, Martin, Lakpa Bhutia) wear masks around their chins as if understanding there’s a health crisis but not worrying about it.

So, what is Field of Mars really about? As one character notes, “Sometimes the confusion is part of it.” Perhaps we’re sitting onstage because we’re all part of this confusion, part of the problem as we potentially face the end times, masks around our chins.

There’s no program, just a glossy one-sheet with only the most basic of information, along with a free souvenir paper poster that features a drawing of a stick figure in a doorway on one side and advises on the other, “I promise I will not look to the natural world to make up for my lack of spirituality ever again.”

OMG. It all makes perfect sense to me.

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”

NYC PLAYERS: THE VESSEL

The Statue of Liberty and the Freedom Tower stand tall in background of New York City Players’ The Vessel (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE VESSEL
Skyport Marina
2430 FDR Dr. at Twenty-Third St.
June 1-3, $40 (sold out)
Return engagement Wednesday, September 22, $40, 6:00
www.nycplayers.org

“What a symphony for the senses!” one of thirteen performers declares in New York City Players’ The Vessel. The new work, part of the troupe’s Incoming Theater Division (ITD) and LMCC’s residency program, is itself a symphony for the senses. It takes place aboard the Harbor Lights boat, which departs from the Skyport Marina on East Twenty-Third St. and anchors in front of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, with Lower Manhattan and the Freedom Tower visible in the background. The audience is seated in white folding chairs on the upper outdoor deck, where the actors march in, one by one, to stand on two small portable platforms, delivering short eulogies written by current and former members of ITD and then leaving, replaced by the next actor. The monologues are true stories of people the writers have lost, delivered in director and company founder Richard Maxwell’s trademark plainly spoken, carefully modulated yet moving style.

The forty-five-minute play was conceived by Jasmine Pisapia and Katiana Rangel in collaboration with writers and actors Rossana Appleton, Brandon Davis, Jim Fletcher, Linda Mancini, Brian Mendes, Enoch Ntunga, Michael Odom, Yasmin Sanchez, Bréhima Sangaré, Gillian Walsh, Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Charles Reina, and Bjorn Lee Varella. Ntunga remembers his little brother, Siméon. Walsh says farewell to her cousin Billy. Odom promises his late mother that they will meet again. Pisapia recalls her grandmother Jeannette. Mendes, who played Uncle Jerry in Maxwell’s Isolde, shares stories about his deceased Uncle Jerry, who turns out to be a famous musician.

Occasionally, the previous performer remains on one of the platforms as the next character tells their tale, becoming a silent witness onstage and another audience member. The actors are a diverse cast of ethnicities and genders, sizes and abilities; the parade of different looks and accents takes on a potent meaning with the Statue of Liberty behind them, a symbol of hope for immigrants for nearly 150 years (while also evoking the current border crises), as well as the Freedom Tower, a skyscraper built on the site where more than three thousand people from around the world were murdered on 9/11. It’s also impossible not to think about all those lost to Covid-19 over the past fifteen months.

The Vessel takes place on board Harbor Lights party boat (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

However, Maxwell (The Evening, Samara) never lets the show get overly sentimental or treacly; you might get teary, but there are plenty of laughs and smiles, as this exploration of death is a celebration of life. Birds fly around the ship. The setting sun casts a glow. Noisy party boats pass by. Horns blow and bells ring. Construction can be seen in the distance. The wind whips gently against your face. (Although you are supposed to wear masks, about half of the audience didn’t, whether sipping a drink from the bar or not.) Perhaps most importantly, you are sitting right next to other people, enjoying live performance again; there is no social distancing in this communal outdoor space.

The loveliest moment of the performance occurred during Rangel’s tale about her friend Bob Feldman. As the actor talked about memories and listed things they had shared together — Little Pie coffee, the saxophone, Cuban food, sadness, hugs — the boat began rocking precariously. Pausing to maintain his balance — it frequently looked like he’d fall over as the actor next to him watched closely, amused, perhaps considering reaching out to help him stay up — he somehow managed to sway and waver without losing any of the words, the brief hesitations palpable as the audience rooted for him to finish without surrendering to gravity. “Bob said a few times that during those nights he felt completely alive again,” the eulogy concludes. For three hours on board a boat in New York Harbor, the feeling was mutual.

ISOLDE

Massimo (Gary Wilmes), Patrick (Jim Fletcher), and Isolde (Tory Vazquez) discuss function and beauty, love and memory in splendidly constructed Richard Maxwell play (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $55-$100
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Writer-director Richard Maxwell uses the construction of a Jungian dream house as a sharp metaphor for the building of a play in his latest experimental work, Isolde. Hyperrealism, surrealism, psychobabble, inside jokes, and the occasional cliché combine to form a grounded though existential narrative that has a lot to say about life, love, and the theater. As the play begins, Isolde (Tory Vazquez), a popular actress, is running lines with her husband, Patrick (Jim Fletcher), a successful contractor. She is rehearsing for a role in a play based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, but she gets frustrated when she keeps losing her place. “Should we start from the top?” Patrick says? “No, no! I can get it,” she replies. “OK. . . . Um. Isolde. To get the line . . . Did you ever just try saying what you feel?” Patrick asks. He’s worried about her mental health, but she’s concerned about a lot more than that. “It’s getting worse!” she declares. Her career might be in jeopardy, but she is energized by Massimo (Gary Wilmes), the “artist architect” she has hired to design their latest vacation house. Massimo’s method involves getting to know his clients very well before deciding what to build, which in this case includes growing a little too close to Isolde. They discuss function and beauty, home and memory, while Patrick, a practical realist, becomes more and more concerned that Massimo, a poetic fantasist, isn’t really doing anything, so he brings in his friend Uncle Jerry (Brian Mendes), a gruff construction worker, for his opinion. Massimo and Uncle Jerry lock horns almost instantly, their differing styles at odds. As the three men watch football and bicker among themselves, Isolde gets right to the point. “Imagine knowing something is missing and not knowing what that is. That dresser, that doorway. That tree, that face. That thought. The panic of it not being there,” she tells Massimo with Shakespearean grace. “Wait till you see it gone and the terror of one day not even knowing that it’s gone — how do you mourn that which you cannot recall? You’re only left with the ghost of some longing, a deadened sensation of the void. How subtle is the gift of memory? How precious?”

Massimo (Gary Wilmes) and Patrick (Jim Fletcher) both have their hands full in ISOLDE (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Isolde takes place on Sacha Van Riel’s somewhat spare set, with exposed, movable plywood walls and a far-off image of the lake they are building near, as if the play’s setting is as unfinished as Massimo’s design. There are numerous bits of dialogue that refer to the making of theater as much as the construction of a house. “Where is the flow? Should you have two stories?” Massimo asks. “This is my cue?” Patrick says, adding, “Can we see a budget?” Maxwell also takes a wry stab at how he perhaps has been perceived as an avant-garde theater director, as Massimo explains: “People often get the wrong impression about me. They think I’m this laid back guy and I am but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. The truth is some of my ideas are not always embraced. And I’ll be the first to tell you I come across as arrogant, but I see my peers bumble through the orthodoxy of architecture and I want to be impressed with their work but I’m not impressed.” Fletcher (House of Dance, And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid), Vazquez (People without History, Wrestling Ladies), and Wilmes (Chinglish, Straight White Men) are joys to watch, so at ease with one another; veterans of Maxwell’s New York City Players company, they also portrayed characters immersed in a love triangle in Gatz, Elevator Repair Service’s eight-hour adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. To further the various meta surrounding the multilayered show, Maxwell is married to Vazquez and went to high school with Wilmes. As with nearly all of Maxwell’s productions (Neutral Hero, House, The Evening), the terrific actors — including Mendes, who offers a refreshing honesty and bluntness as Uncle Jerry — recite their often abstruse, disconnected dialogue plainly and directly, without overt emotion, almost robotic at times, although their performances are filled with passion. Artists of many disciplines are often compared to architects, and, of course, vice versa; in the eighty-five-minute Isolde, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene through September 27, Maxwell lifts the concept to a whole new level, or should we say story. “Function is beauty; it takes us out of the past, answers the future,” Isolde says to Massimo early on. “Don’t erect a monument just to hold on to something.” In Maxwell’s world, function is indeed beauty, and he builds works that are much more than mere monuments.

THE EVENING

Asi (Brian Mendes), Beatrice (Cammisa Buerhaus), and Cosmo (Jim Fletcher) contemplate life in Richard Maxwell’s THE EVENING (photo by Paula Court)

The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 28, $20-$25, 8:00
212-255-5793 ext11
thekitchen.org
www.nycplayers.org

In his latest play, simply titled The Evening, experimental writer-director Richard Maxwell, head of the New York City Players, takes apart and rebuilds the way experience is structured as theatrical presentation. When The Evening had its world premiere in January as the opening selection of the Walker Art Center’s “Out There” festival, it began with Maxwell (Isolde, Netural Hero) sitting down at a table and reading a story about the recent death of his father, who had passed away while Maxwell was well into writing and rehearsing his new work. But in its New York premiere, a coproduction of the Kitchen and Performance Space 122 at the former’s black-box theater in Chelsea, the show starts with Cammisa Buerhaus reading Maxwell’s personal tale, in a straightforward, somewhat impersonal and direct voice. When she is finished, she becomes Beatrice, a bartender in a drinking establishment that couldn’t be more plain. Her only customers this night are Cosmo (Jim Fletcher), a balding, middle-aged fight manager dressed in a blue-gray velour tracksuit, and Asi (Brian Mendes), a low-level mixed-martial-arts fighter with a heavily bruised face. The easygoing Cosmo just wants to hang out, drink beer and Jell-O shots, smoke pot, and eat pizza, explaining, “I like this place, I’m not going to lie. Can’t really think of any better place to be.” Asi is determined to get back in the cage and keep fighting despite his middling career. And Beatrice is tired of it all, ready to run away to Istanbul by herself. Cosmo, who flirts with Beatrice, thinks she should go, but Asi, who might or might not be her boyfriend, is insistent that she stay. Meanwhile, a band arrives, consisting of two men (guitarist James Moore, drummer David Zuckerman) and one woman (bassist Andie Springer), mirroring the barfly love triangle, and starts playing moody indie songs (written by Maxwell). When Beatrice makes a surprise, unexpected move, all three of them suddenly have to face who they are and what they want out of this mundane, virtually hopeless life.

The Evening takes place in a “lonely corner of the universe,” where archetypal characters speak in actorly voices on a stage that reveals itself as an artificial theatrical construct; set designer Sascha van Riel also keeps the lights on throughout the show, a constant reminder to the audience that what they are watching is not real. As things get a bit crazy between Cosmo, Asi, and Beatrice, the band keeps playing, looking at the action but not the slightest bit worried that it will affect them, even as danger lurks. There’s a shock when Beatrice pulls out a gun and puts it down heavily on the bar, the sharp, loud sound echoing throughout the theater, forcing a kind of reality back into the fold. (The only other purely real elements are the pizza Cosmo is eating and the SEC college football game that is playing on a flat-screen television.) Melding Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh with Brecht and Beckett, Maxwell explores the differences between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, form and function, real people and stage performers, then tears it all down and reconstructs it in a dazzling existential finale. “We live in this garbagey void,” Asi says to Beatrice, “of all the old tropes of standing still and forgotten dreams.” The first in a trilogy inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Evening packs a whole lot to think about in its brief sixty-five minutes, reinterpreting old tropes and investigating the human condition as it fades out into a memorable, elegiac landscape of hazy hopes and dreams.

HotelMotel

Sarah Lemp is cold and calculating as a dark sex therapist in Derek Ahonen’s PINK KNEES ON PALE SKIN (photo by Monica Simoes)

The Gershwin Hotel
7 East 27th St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through September 19, $60 (extended through October 10, $35)
www.theamoralists.com

Over the last several years, hotels have become more than just a place for tourists to rest their weary bones in New York City. During Armory Week, the Dylan Hotel hosts the Verge Art Fair, while the PooL Art Fair fills rooms in the Gershwin Hotel with site-specific installations. Last fall, Swiss theater architect Dominic Huber set his adaptation of Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy in the Goethe-Institut, transforming the 1014 Fifth Ave. building into a ghostly hotel. And Punchdrunk’s dazzling Sleep No More, in the old McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, has been extended yet again, this time through September 24. Joining the trend is the daring Brooklyn-based Amoralists theater company, which is currently putting on a double feature in a specially designed room in the back of the lobby of the Gershwin Hotel. Standing by its decree to be “fearless, courageous, dangerous, uncomfortable, and rattled . . . to get dirty . . . and to bleed, sweat, and cry,” the company is presenting HotelMotel, two full-length productions that provide lots of thrills and chills for adventurous theatergoers — twenty people at a time.

HotelMotel begins with the world premiere of Pink Knees on Pale Skin, written and directed by Derek Ahonen. After checking in and being given a key card, “guests” are escorted to their room, actually one of approximately twenty folding chairs lined up in one row around three sides of a bed draped in luscious red. A pianist plays in one corner of the room, which features a rose-wallpapered ceiling and four Gershwin Hotel bathrobes hanging on hooks. Soon Dr. Sarah Bauer (Sarah Lemp) and her boyfriend, Leroy (Jordan Tisdale) enter, preparing for the arrival of two married couples who have come to them because of sexual problems in their relationships. Heart surgeon Robert Wyatt (James Kautz) has cheated on his wife, lawyer Caroline (Vanessa Vache), while comedian Allison Williams (Anna Stromberg) is unable to achieve orgasm with her spouse, playwright Ted (Byron Anthony). The cold, manipulating, very direct Bauer has promised to cure them all — via a group-sex orgy (which could potentially involve Leroy as well). Bauer masterfully handles the two couples even as it slowly becomes apparent that she has some of her own deep-seated demons haunting her. The well-developed characters and believable story line build to a hot and heavy climax as spectators are turned into voyeurs who will be hard-pressed not to be titillated by the events unfolding right in front of them. Ahonen flawlessly navigates the emotional spectrum, resulting in a penetrating, insightful, and wickedly funny sex comedy that is not afraid to pull at the heartstrings.

William Apps has a thing for putting odd things down his pants in Adam Rapp’s ANIMALS AND PLANTS (photo by Monica Simoes)

After a twenty-minute break, the audience is ushered back inside for the New York premiere of writer-director Adam Rapp’s Animals and Plants. Set designer Alfred Schatz has turned the space into a messy low-budget motel room in Boone, North Carolina, with pizza boxes, beer cans, and men’s toiletries strewn all over the place. This time people can sit wherever they want, either in the two rows on one side of the white-covered bed or in one of several chairs within the set; we strongly recommend the seat by the windowed door if you don’t mind being more in the middle of things. As the audience enters, the curly haired Dantly (William Apps) is sitting on the bed, staring at the television, which is showing nothing but static, while the pianist tinkles away right behind him (and remains there silently once the play kicks in). The room is filled with a multitude of stuffed birds and animals, evoking a Norman Bates–like atmosphere. Dantly’s partner in crime, Burris (Matthew Pilieci), soon emerges, a fast-talking muscle man who can’t stop exercising or using three-dollar words that both impress and confound the not-too-bright Dantly (who spends most of the first half of the play with one hand down his pants, where he likes to put such odd objects as an ice scraper, which turned out to be not such a great idea). The two men are in Boone to pull off a deal for an unseen boss in the midst of a blizzard, but mysterious phone calls and a singing man (Brian Mendes) in a grizzly bear outfit lighting matches lead to surreal situations that might or might not actually be happening, all coming together for a powerful, action-packed finale. Animals and Plants is more experimental than its predecessor, challenging the audience by subverting convention and delving into fantastical narrative. Near the beginning, Burris sits down on the toilet and goes to the bathroom (rather convincingly) in full view of many of the spectators, announcing that this will be something different, and indeed it is. And when Cassandra (Katie Broad) later shows up, the play takes off in yet another unanticipated direction. Animals and Plants is more theatrical in general than the more intimate Pink Knees on Pale Skin, but both create riveting situations that make inventive use of the limited space, which never feels claustrophobic. Both shows also include full-frontal male nudity, which can be both funny and disconcerting in such close quarters. Whereas Ahonen tempts the audience to consider their own personal relationships, Rapp invites them to consider the relationship between audience and performer; taken as a whole, HotelMotel is an exciting, well-rounded, unique theatrical experience that is well worth checking in to. [Ed. note: The production has been extended once more, through October 10, with all tickets now just $35; in addition, Michael Cerveris and Loose Cattle will perform on September 30 in the hotel lounge from 6:00 to 7:00.]