Show Response: The Complicated: STRIPPED

by Katie Walenta

To be in the audience of Cusi Cram’s stripped-back production of The Complicated was to be enveloped in a blanket of earnestness. The audience clapped often throughout the show, an impromptu symphony of anticipation and thrill. Central to both the set and the story was a vast claw-foot bathtub. I’ve been ruminating on how effectively the bathtub both grounded the world and brought us through time. It was kind of like a boat — we were all stationary on the boat, but the boat itself was on an adventure. I’ve also been thinking about a monologue the protagonist gave while propped up against the side of the tub. In the monologue, Manca talks about being away at school and becoming obsessed with a white van in the parking lot of her dormitory, convinced that something vile takes place nightly inside of it. The parallel of the white van’s imagined danger and the white tub’s imagined safety was a lesson in the power of memory. There was a talk-back following the performance, and something Cram said feels like the thesis of not only the script, but the entire theatrical experience the artistic team crafted. Cram talked about the nature of growing up in many different worlds. She expressed that along with the challenges of identity that she faced, her upbringing gave her diplomatic superpowers, and was, in a lot of ways, freeing.

The Complicated ran at LABrynth Theater Company Februuary 20th - March 3rd as part of the LAB:STRIPPED staged works in progress series.

Photo by Monique Carboni

Show Response: DeliaDelia! The flat chested witch!

by Patrick Denney

“I love this D-I-Y Performance Space,” trills DeliaDelia, the titular character of Amando Houser’s latest solo show DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch, “It reminds me of my childhood.” This is an apt comparison. Brick Aux comes across as a cross between a spacious living room and that classic crucible of childhood performance: the cafetorium. “It reminds me of… my trauma,” they proclaim, defining the parameters of what is about to come. For a less nuanced performer, what unfurls might be described as cringe, but in Houser’s capable hands, their creation becomes an experienced musician, playing forever just in front of or behind the beat. 

DeliaDelia may look like Elphaba, but their demeanor is one of a glitched Glinda. Their voice is bright but clipped, punctuated by a Mickey Mouse chordal that tactically denies the audience the reassurance of a smooth narrative flow. The moment the audience teeters on the brink of comfort, Houser explodes with jarring aggression. After anxiously polling the audience about their relationship status, the earnest witch zeroes in on a single man in the audience. A reluctant back and forth with this paramour ensues. The exchange teeters on the verge of teeth-pulling. Several beats past a natural conclusion, something snaps inside DeliaDelia. The timidity falls away and they erupt at the audience member: “What are you, a f*ggot?” The room is clearly jarred by the outburst, some unsettled by twinges of pained familiarity, others by ally-inflected outrage. Others still seem irked by the guilty reminder that anyone old enough to call themselves a 90s kid was privy to the extended death rattle of “that’s so gay” as a socially acceptable insult, and perhaps, a shield. The sunnier side of DeliaDelia quickly returns after this blip. The beau-to-be consents to come on stage and an innocent ball game ensues, accented by Houser’s machismo-tinged dribbling skills. Once something has been released, though, it is almost impossible for it to be forced into a box again.

The show unfolds in this vein through a series of distilled childhood exercises. To be someone’s “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” the words need only to be spoken and they are true. These honorifics become a kind of dress-up clothes — things to be put on, twirled about, and cavorted in before being cast off in favor of something shiny and/or new. Of course there is a sweetly sapphic pillow fight that flows into a pivotal moment of sexual self-discovery. “I think, I think I might like girls?” floats DeliaDelia with the sense that the slightest hesitation could cause them to retreat back to their swampy closest. No hesitation comes.

This discovery flows into a musically motivated glow-up. Houser produces a new dress from behind a screen. The opening strains of Roger and Hammerstein’s “I Enjoy Being a Girl” begins and DeliaDelia mouths along. Throughout, they remove their old frock in favor of the more-detailed, perhaps grown-up option. In this routine, the scars of a double mastectomy are clearly seen. Perhaps the trauma they mentioned at the top, the trauma of carrying a pair of public reminders that the body you’re born into did not necessarily match the person growing inside of it. To add another wrinkle, though, is it still possible to enjoy being a girl while longing for something else? Houser seems to think so, showcasing with deep depth the ability to hold this contraction within themselves. In one of the final moments of the show conflation this new DeliaDelia combines a cable kid’s show kookiness and frat house masculinity, to perform a kind of keg stand. Supported by an uneasy audience member, DeliaDelia drains a radioactive can of Mountain Dew through a beer bong. They seem to enjoy being a boy, or at least, to throw on the costume of stereotyped gender play.

Houser’s character evokes a visceral kind of energetic awkwardness. DeliaDelia seems like an extra-committed Girl Scout on the brink of belting out a tuneless version of “Defying Gravity” for some musical theater merit badge. There is something deeply private about it. This kind of intensity is the purview of basements and bedrooms: secluded, domestic pockets of discovery. In this world, there is only the performer, the cast recording, and the lovingly mongrel mash-up of those two worlds colliding. Off-kilter and earnest, the high notes cannot and will not be hit. It doesn’t matter, though. The space between is glossed over by the specific kind of deep affection borne out of hyper-fixation. A brash, bold choice is the only choice imaginable. Every stumble creates the possibility of stumbling into a deeper sense of self. Close enough is enough, warts and all.

DeliaDelia! The flat chested witch! ran at Brick Aux March 1st - 2nd 2024.

Photo by Arin Sang-urai

Show Response: this house is not a home

by Theresa Buchheister, https://theresabuchheister.com/

This is a response to performance written via memory.

Staff Picks has encouraged audience members to write the response, which has implied (up to this point) an immediacy. That is so valuable. How did you FEEL? What did you EXPERIENCE?

But, as a person who has entered their 20th year in NY and who sees over 400 shows/year, a response that I have become more and more interested in is memory. What sticks in the folds of my brain? What lives with me forever like a little ghost, possessing a part of my insides? What sneaks into my dreams years after the experience of the live show?

When I chose this house is not a home by Nile Harris as one of my Staff Picks, I did it because I saw the show in July and, even though I could not go again in January, I wanted to scream at everyone who missed it 6 months ago to take this opportunity and GO! Second chances are special. They don't come around all that often.

So, what do I remember? 

I remember thinking for the first time - Why do 501c3s exist?

I remember being scared that someone would get hurt in the bouncy castle.

I remember being amazed at that many adults in a bouncy castle.

I remember Crackhead Barney proclaiming that the whole audience was a bunch of theys.

I remember marveling multiple times - I have never seen that before! 

I remember being stunned by a dance moment.

I remember the monologue on the stairs.

I remember the rollgate going down in the back.

I remember getting fixated on the pressure to deliver.

As I try to type out what I remember, I am fixated on the pressure to deliver. I am deleting A LOT. I am fixated on trying to write eloquently about a show that is a full experience and is meant to be experienced. It feels heavy and like I cannot do it justice. Like the google doc that inspired it, the show is living and present and impossible to freeze. It is important and hard to grasp. It is layered with absurdity and truth. It is a creation of this time and these artists, but it is also epic enough to reverberate forever.

this house is not a home ran from January 6th - January 14th at Abrons Arts Center as part of Under the Radar

Photo by Alex Munro

Show Response: Open Mic Night

by kanishk pandey, https://kanishkpandey.com/

Here is your day. You start it early to make it to an allergy shot appointment. You do this weekly to one day not suffer at the hands of everything. You schedule these early so that you can go to work unbothered. You go in. You get the shot. You leave for work. Yet, at one point, you notice an itchiness beginning to spread across your arm. Strange. A look down reveals a set of hives traveling down from your shots. Shit. You’re now in urgent care, where they’ve given you Benadryl and Prednisone, which relieve your hives but make you feel insane since it’s mixing a drowsy medication with something that sets your brain on fire. The doctor lets you know you luckily caught it before it progressed to anaphylaxis. Sick. Done being so close to death, you walk back to work alone.

Your day goes on. As if it never began, the work day is done. You stepped through it solo, dragging your feet to see if it speeds things up. But your day isn’t done. A friend invited you weeks ago to come see a show. You agreed and now you can’t say no - and you don’t particularly want to say no either. So you take the train into Manhattan, walk 20 minutes from the station rather than transfer, and end up at Performance Space New York, where you head to the fourth floor. You wave hi to your friends, who’ve arrived already, take your seat, and settle in.

Open Mic Night then begins. The show is by Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey. The two are also the only performers. The show begins with a simple ode to a space long gone, an illegal DIY venue that has now disappeared. It was where the duo met each other. Mounsey performed poetry, and Weiss performed stand-up. Mounsey tells all of this to you, and the rest of the audience, simply and quietly, stating it all as fact before Weiss enters onstage to hang a light and take his place for most of the performance. Suddenly, the lights change, from performance to as if it’s time to go. You are now within the show, as Weiss points at audience members asking preference questions, then stomps into the stands to hand the microphone to others for more detailed questions, then finally takes a few people onstage to give shoutouts to their friends before they’re shuffled back to their seats. All in the effort to get to know everyone better. Weiss claims that he needs to do this since he gets anxious on stage. You are asked, at one point, to pick between a tough cookie and a soft slice of cake. You know which you picked. It’s an onslaught of questions, tone shifts, intermixed with abrasive sound cues, that lead you, and the audience around you, to laugh the whole way through, as if your stomach is about to burst. 

And then the tone shifts. Weiss now announces he’s tired of playing this character, and shifts into sincerity. You, and the audience, now find yourselves back at the beginning, when Mounsey first mentioned the long lost venue where the two met. Weiss recounts the feeling of loss, and recites everything he will remember to keep that space alive. And suddenly, you are very much in contact with the grief being expressed by this piece. You’ve never been to that venue. Yet, you’ve been in contact with people. And there’s a central concept suddenly fully clear - that, in the space of performance, where unique experiences are created rather than simply refurbished for consumption, a performer may stand alone on stage. But the whole experience is filled with other people. There is no loneliness, and even with the vicious entropy of time and money that swallows spaces and people and words, the collective within a performance experience will ensure everything to live on in memory. Even now, you find yourself with the memory of this venue now imprinted into your being. In the face of a world where things meant to help you may kill you, and where small spaces are so quickly devoured by massive real estate firms, there is still the unique theatrical experience where you can be not alone, for even just an hour and change, and feel fulfilled by the presence of other human beings, alive despite it all, together despite it all.

Weiss and Mounsey both accuse each other of having an addiction for performance. Despite sporting all the signs of discomfort with the setting, they nonetheless perform. Yet, perhaps that addiction is not to performance per se - but to the people and the connection inherent to the practice. Even in the most negative of settings, no one is truly alone in the world of live performance.

The show ends. You step out onto First Avenue. You face the cold. And the day suddenly feels worth it. You can go home or out, renewed again. You weren’t alone for a moment, and, at some point in the future, you won’t be alone again. 

Open Mic Night ran from January 5th to January 18th, 2024 at Performance Space New York as part of Under The Radar

Photo by Walter Włodarczyk

Show Response: Rose: You Are Who You Eat

by Travis Amiel, https://travisamiel.com/

As I turn the corner to the basement space at La MaMa there is a surprise. A group of women offer "hugs from a mom". I receive a very good hug. In my seat, waiting for the show to start I stare at the projection on a translucent curtain right at the separation of stage and audience. There are two elements to it: a slideshow of a youngster, and live feed of the star John Jarboe's face sitting just a bit behind the curtain, with the effect that Jarboe is staring at these same photos. And John is masticating on bucket of chicken.

John tells us about recently learning that early on in utero, there was another fetus(!) and John ate her!! Through songs and anecdotes we the audience laugh about the implications of cannibalism. At times, we are implicated to portray John's Midwestern mother, always blaming tax season for everything.

I have heard so many stories of transitions, queer realizations, years of repression, the signs missed that in retrospect are obvious. As a person that takes things literally, Jarboe telling this coming out story connected through these dots is most satisfying to me. Of course it’s one person’s story, and simply a metaphor.

My favorite moment from the show is a reperformance of a piece John did at a young age for her parents (referring to them as "subscribers, donors") wearing only gloves and white underpants flagellating around the stage and seating, mumbling in a high pitched voice.

I say to myself the title of the show a few times throughout it. In the final scene, we the audience have a role, to tie things together, to learn new language, and practice acceptance. And as I leave the theatre, I appreciate the metaphors we create to figure out why we are who we are.

Rose: You Are Who You Eat ran January 10th - January 20th, 2024 at La Mama Experimental Theater Club as part of Under the Radar

Preview 2024: Staff Picks Special Editon

When I think about the nuances of my personal taste, the most undeniable factor in that development has been living in New York for nearly 20 years. I visited in January of 2004 during the winter break of my senior year in college to see some shows and discover what living in NY "is really like" from my friends who had graduated the year before and been in Brooklyn for less than a year. Retrospect renders that mission truly adorable. 

I got to see the opening night of Richard Foreman's King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe and the following night see David Greenspan as Mephistopheles in Target Margin's Faust Part One. Needless to say, I moved here in the fall.

Coming from Kansas and being a self-proclaimed intellectual, I had no idea what live performance could do or be, no idea what it meant to make art in a city where venues close and collaborators die and capitalism dictates opportunity, and definitely no idea how to get from place to place. 

As I shimmy my less youthful self into 2024, I am thinking a great deal about the past 20 years and the next 20 years. It is with that in mind that I want to highlight some things I am deeply fucking stoked to experience this January. 

PROJECTS BY ARTISTS WHO HAVE CEMENTED THEMSELVES IN MY HEART AND MIND AS ICONIC 

I love meeting new artists and seeing first/second/third experiments. OF COURSE. But, it is one of the most meaningful and deepest pleasures for me to have the honor of a journey with an artist or group. To have multiple points of reference. To have favorite shows and least favorite shows. To have full top ten lists of just their creations. Who are those gems that are presenting this January?

Banana Bag and Bodice at The Doxsee at Target Margin Theater with Hubris Always Gets You In The End - It would be pretty impossible for Banana Bag to ever fall off of my top ten companies of all time list. I honestly do not think it is possible. Even if they never made another show. But they ARE making a show. And there is nobody like them. I am screaming at the top of my lungs - DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW!

The Million Underscores at We Are Here with Those Moveable Pieces - TMU are the truest artists in Brooklyn. I am being super superlative today and that is just my vibe. It is also something I have been lucky to witness for ten years, as they never stop creating, innovating, working in the actual realities of this world and their lives and through their own special sorcery, presenting their fascinating projects to us instead of languishing in development. Their Gestating Baby piece in April was unanimously dubbed the sexiest show that has ever happened at The Brick. The Passenger broke every rule. The Observatory made me sit back in full wonder. Whatever happens in January will live in the folds of my brain forever.

Yuki Kawahisa at The Brick with ten dreams of metamorphoses or me talk dirty some day - Yuki is an artist that I have seen elevate, expand and infuse multiple other peoples' projects with an impeccable ease for years. This is HER project. This is HER voice. This is HER unique approach. 

PROJECTS THAT ARE A REALLY GREAT TIME AND EFFORTLESSLY WEIRD (ie probably a little gross, a little sexy, a little funny, a little virtuosic) - 

This is thingNY in a nutshell. Yes, it is experimental opera and that can feel either like it was made for you OR you are not gonna get it. But this group is different. There is so much tenderness under that shell of extreme talent. There is a lot of goofiness rippling through the thematic intensity and serious practice. Natural Studies is at The Brick. If you have never felt invited into the realm of experimental music, come on in. If you think narrative theater is over, come on in. If you need to vibe out, please, come on in.

PROJECTS I AM THANKING THE STARS THAT I GET TO EXPERIENCE A SECOND TIME - 

Deepe Darknesse by Lisa Fagan, Lena Engelstein and Hannah Mitchell and Open Mic Night by Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss are two shows that you could not stop me from seeing again. People are like - But Theresa, your January is so busy and you have already seen those shows... And I am like - I know what I like and I am seeing these shows again and nobody can stop me. It is one of my favorite things in the world to get a second chance.

All of these shows are in January. Look em up. Get tickets. Have an experience or two. And then let those experiences build and form relationships. 

- Theresa Buchheister

Staff Picks’ Picker’s End-o-Year Lists

Dear Staff Picks Readers-

We want to thank you for following our Picks as we ponder, write, attend, and respond to the wide world of performance going on around us. It has been a wonderful way to learn about artists and venues for all of us, as well! Every week we are amazed and delighted by the wide-ranging Picks of the Staff. As we round out 2023, we wanted to participate in the honored tradition of making end-of-year lists, so here we go! Some will be shared today and some next week. We must note that Staff are only making Lists from their own Picks. Staff Picks began in June AND often Staff would not Pick a show that had already been Picked. Some Pickers may make other lists on their own socials that cover the full year and maybe movies, too... Next week, we will also share some exciting Previews for 2024 here on the ol' Soap Box, too! Have fun reading and share your lists with us, if you like!

-Staff Picks 

The staff were asked their top five shows (1-5):

Billy McEntee:
1. Odyssey 1: Telemachus at Home
2. Grief Hotel
3. Sad Boys in Harpy Land
4. cryptochrome
5. How to Make a Revolution Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

hillary gao:
1. Boy mother / faceless bloom
2. Faust (The Broken Show)
3. Prometheus Firebringer
4. Timelapse
5. TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH / 땅끝까지

Theresa Buchheister:
1. The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven
2. Disney Adult
3 . Faust (The Broken Show)
4. Dance Die Crucify
5. would you set the table if I asked you to?

Travis Amiel:
1. SHABOOM!
2. Sad Boys in Harpy Land*
3. KŌSA
4. In Hell with Jesus/Top 40
5. O Come Let Us Adore Them

*(Top because I was able to discuss this the most with people I loved)

Lena Engelstein:
1. Sad Boys in Harpy Land @ Abrons & Playwrights by Alex Tatarsky
2. Food @ BAM by Geoff Sobell
3. Weathering @ the NYLA studio showing APAP 2023 by Faye Driscoll
4. Open Mic Night by Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey;
5. The Rite of Spring @ The Armory by Pina Bausch

…and asked what they were saddest they could not attend…

Billy: I did not attend any La Mama shows this year, and that is a sin.
hillary: im a pause im a fiction im a pervert im a dream: Barnett Cohen
Theresa: BAC Open House
Travis: CEREMONIA
Lena: Psychic Self Defense

…and what the weirdest moment they saw was…

Billy: Letting my mind wander to stop interpreting the text in The Complaint Society
hillary: A fully cooked chicken being held (fisted? if I remember correctly) during Chicken Sister.
Theresa: reverse strip tease in Disney Adult
Travis: Every second of SHABOOM!
Lena: This category is so daunting. Every single day is the strangest experience of my life.

…and their biggest revelation…

Billy: Discovering, only when Becca Blackwell was before me in a vagina costume, that I did not know where a clitorist was.
hillary: Matthew Antoci and Meaghan Robichaud’s remix of “They Wanna Fuck” (by Kim Petras) during MEOW.
Theresa: Can Yasar playing huge Steinway piano and singing as part of the VISA Mon Amor event at Prelude
Travis: The way that time figurateively slowed down in KŌSA
Lena: Of all the weeks of the year, I take the best care of myself during the ones in which I am performing (baths after every night, eating well, sleeping enough) except for the 3 hours after a show where I smoke and drink and scream at a bar.

…and a category they feel is missing…

Theresa: Trend I Want To Support - Creating ambitious and opinionated design outside of the trappings of proper theater.
Travis: Most Uncomfortable (in a good way) Moment: Crackhead Barney's crowdwork in this house is not a home.

Soapbox Special! Two festivals happening in October our staff want you to know about

This month, there are two exciting theater and performance festivals taking place in the city, and here at Staff Picks we just can’t stop talking about them. We’ve already highlighted a few shows from both these lineups in the past two Weekly Picks, so a rogue and errant editor thought it would be nice to do a feature on what’s especially piquing us.

The Breaking The Binary Theatre Festival
L Morgan Lee, George Strus
3 Dollar Bill; The Public's Shiva Theater
October 23rd - October 29th 2023

B2B's star is rising, as it should be: its shows are written by and for trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ artists; their events build community in ways exemplary and organic; and their second annual festival showcases seven new plays — all entirely FREE. Go support, friends.

Staffer: Billy McEntee

Prelude Festival 2023
Artists listed below
Segal Theater
October 7th - October 28th 2023

I'm too busy this week to individually do justice to the whole PRELUDE line-up, so I'm collecting here for you the shows and panels I'm going to see this upcoming week (or would if I could), which is not the exclusive "what to see" list...just what I happen to know as a dancer-admiring(envying)-theater girl. And again it's all FREE! Can you even believe that...what are you waiting for?? Gorge yourself on shows!

AND! I got a preview of the festival vibes this Saturday at Radiohole's kickoff variety night. It was electric: my catch all description for a night that feels like theater and dance are alive and well with a pulse, an edge, and well-endowed with a hot and cool community.

Weds: Will Eno, Lisa Fagan + Marianne Rendón + Lena Engelstein (me) (bias)
Thurs: James La Bella, Richard Maxwell + The New York City Player, Sauda Aziza Jackson & April Sweeny
Fri: Nature Theater of Oaklahoma, ERS
Sat: Wooster Group, Ahn Vo

Staffer: Lena Engelstein

Show Response: Bonefruit

by Ali Sousa

Leah Plante-Wiener’s Bonefruit brings us into a stunningly expansive world in its thirtyish-minute runtime. There's a chapel in the desert; a young, solitary priestess; and a traveler, returning to the chapel for the first time in two years. Lark, the priestess, is reading a favorite passage from her scripture about a Beast, whose teeth, when planted, bore fruit for hungry villagers. Anhedonia, the traveler, has come to give her a gift: dried flowers, a rarity in the arid wasteland. Anhedonia is a harvester of teeth and farmer of bonefruit; Lark’s father recently died after consuming it.

There’s a weighty, complicated, beautiful thing between these young women — Anhedonia’s yearning to be good despite her sometimes violent, morally grey lifestyle that’s necessitated by the world they live in, and Lark’s pain and isolation contrasted with her hope for something better; specifically, her belief in Anhedonia’s capacity to be better, or maybe that she has always been good despite it all. Anhedonia comes to the chapel in the hopes of receiving Lark’s absolution despite not being sure she deserves it; Lark makes it clear there’s nothing to absolve.

Plante-Wiener’s writing is poetic, dense, mythical in its worldbuilding — but easily comprehensive and inviting even at its most complex. (Laia Comas’ appropriately sparse direction at the Tank allowed the rich text to be the focal point of the play.) We don’t get the full story of Lark and Anhedonia or their world, but what we do get is so gorgeous and expressive that it feels like we’ve known them for as long as they’ve known each other.

I return to Bonefruit the way Lark returns to her favorite passage. I would watch a whole season of TV set in this universe if I could. For now, after also seeing the play performed at NYU this spring, I’m content to see Lark and Anhedonia’s tender reconciliation again and again in various cozy, unconventional spaces. 

Bonefruit ran at The Tank August 17-19 as part of LimeFest.

Soapbox Special!! Philly Fringe 🥳 🫵

You’re celebrating! You!!!

Staff picker Lena Engelstein is shouting out three shows in the New York City of Pennsylvania, so we are highlighting them here in an ephemerally-instantiated adaptation of the staff picks format. You’ll never seen this again. Until you will.

Catholic Guilt: Kelly McCaughan
https://phillyfringe.org/events/kelly-mccaughan-catholic-guilt/

I bet you're like me and didn't go to Edinburgh's fringe festival this year. Instead, you followed your friends as they somehow did a show every night of August on haggis alone. I saw that this show made the best newcomer shortlist and heard that it was "brave, moving, and slutty." Now it's in Philly for you to see while you eat a cheesesteak.

non-binary pussy: Anh Vo and Kristel Baldoz
https://phillyfringe.org/events/non-binary-pussy/

Is wanting to see a dance based on the title the same as judging a book by its cover? I haven't seen this show so I will put the description as written on the website here: Part music, part dance, part propaganda, the work delivers explicit political and sexual language that is rooted in Marxist rhetoric and black female rap history. I mean... did you see that coming? What I can attest to is that Anh Vo has been pushing at the edges of dance work for years and we are better for it.

Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE)
https://phillyfringe.org/events/das-sofortvergnugen-the-instant-pleasure/

It's Philly's month: Philly Fringe and Cannonball are happening in Sept and this show can be how you kick that off. This show is a delightful, irreverent joy-scroll about insatiable desire straddling dance and theater in that rythmic-gymnast flexible way so dear to me. Travis and Cosimo are a pleasure to watch as they do dirty things like fuck up the serenity prayer.

Show Response: Radio Man

by Tess Walsh

This is a play about a twenty-one-year old girl named Helena and her fourteen-year-old sister. Seven years ago, an explosion destroyed the natural world. The sisters have been camping in what’s left of a national park for the past month after an instance of sexual assault sent them on the run. The little sister, prophetically named Mary-Grace, is obsessed with a voice in her handheld she calls Radio Man, who quotes Robert Frost and dwells on the doom all around him, not necessarily that of the ecological disaster, but more so of the loneliness it has produced. While he lists his woes, another young woman, Vera, approaches the sisters’ camp seeking a bandage. She stays for two weeks. What happens in the time the three of them spend together can only be described as earth-shattering, both literally and figuratively. 

This is a play about a miseducation. To watch the consequences of any miseducation is always soul crushing to an extent, even if set in a world that has moved past what we consider today to be knowledge. Still, the fable that Sarah Groustra has carved out of a trope that will continue to be apt until it becomes our reality borders on the biblical, and speaks to our general struggle to successfully teach younger generations how to navigate the environments they’ve been forced into. 

There is a moment at the play’s climax during which we come to believe that love and intimacy may still be possible in this landscape, a moment where things stand still and maybe won’t move anymore. But then they tragically do, and we’re back on the run. I can't put into words what happens during this breaking apart, in an attempt to both not spoil the plot and to honor the sanctity of it, but: it changed my perspective of the piece entirely. Shortly after this shift happens, you wonder why you didn’t expect it with everything that had led up to it, and then you realize that you had developed the same hope that the girls in this play had come to know and cherish, even if for a short time. The feeling this play’s end leaves you with is one that sticks around for a while, one that forces you to look back at a fourteen-year-old you and wonder what they would’ve done with the knowledge they had in a world that refuses to give them anymore.

Radio Man was presented as part of the 2023 SheNYC Festival at The Connelly Theater. Learn more about Sarah Groustra here.

Photo by Danielle DeMatteo

Show Response: The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven

by Allyson Dwyer

My adorable father doesn't understand streaming, can't really share YouTube videos, but he loves to DVR stuff for me. Recently he recorded a program about Shakespearean times narrated by Leonard Nemoy and the experience of being a groundling. Despite the medieval filth and heckling, I found myself so curious about a world where entertainment, "media," aka our little treats were still a novelty, and thus its occasion demanded not just your attention but your entire being. 

In Ben Holbrook & Nate Weida's hysterical, transformative musical The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven, the lines between stage and spectator are blurred beyond recognition. For a few hours, I may have very well been a groundling of Goldhaven, Arizona, where the entertainment was the spectacle of justice. Amped up by a very justice-loving Mayor Baron Goldenteef (Leon Schwendener, who made me laugh til I cried), this is a kangaroo court blown up 500% to the point that you're observing every crack, every thorny bizarre bug, in the facade of American Exceptionalism.

Benjamin Viertel's direction is that of someone who has created a curtain without there ever being a proscenium. Like a frog in a slow boiling pot, you begin to understand. I'm not just observing, I'm melting into this story. The actors (a stunning brilliant ensemble of animated characters) are not acting for me, in fact, I think they're stuck between me and the town. These people live in this space, and they'll be cracking jokes and singing these songs long after I've left. The most brilliant device that ties this all together is the inclusion of Steakhouse (Gio Naarendorp, the gem at the center of an already stacked cast), a self-made man gone corporate with his string of Steakhouses and canned baked beans. Steakhouse takes not so much a seat as a throne with the audience, and from there heckles the performance, I mean trial. His voice becomes ours, as we are all the almighty consumer, ready to dole out judgements as needed, second by second. This is a beer-in-hand show. Justice will be served. 

I will always laugh at a fart joke, I will always laugh at the word beans. But don't be fooled, the humor is both high-brow and low-brow. Every ingredient, all eleven herbs and spices, are mixed in and out Ben Holbrook's intricate script for maximum brain massaging. Total sublimation, and a demand from the viewer that they be engaged in a way that cannot happen anywhere else but in that room. Go, go with friends, go with the need for a (beautiful, harmonic) country folk song in your heart. Go and be a groundling, phoneless and ready to howl and laugh with those around you, in real time, like a very good dream.

The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven is running at The Brick Theater until August 12th.

Photo credit: Ben Holbrook

Show Response: This House is Not a Home

by Patrick Denney

An artfully noodling dance sequence performed in a pair of viral red boots. Two Dimes Square denizens feeding off each other in a vape-fueled Meisner exercise that ends in violent scuffle. A Times Square gingerbread man thrashes across the stage, accompanied by a relentless torrent of harsh noise and crackling voiceover. The performance artist Crackhead Barney sparks an N-word-fueled back-and-forth between herself and an ASL interpreter. And, of course, a full-sized bouncy castle, blown up in real time. Comedy club crowd work careens into the fraught dynamics of interracial relationships. Consensual joy comes up against thrumming, cultivated discomfort. If, per Nicole Kidman’s dictum, heartbreak is supposed to feel good in a place like this, what if it just doesn’t? The actions of Nile Harris’s This House is Not a Home feels almost like scrolling through the hyper-niche TikTok feed of a performance studies grad student. Some moments whiz by with the high-speed passivity of the swipe. Others linger, stuck fast, layer upon layer of rich data seeping into the viewer, altering the increasingly complex algorithms of our brains. This House beautifully stages these blunt force logics of online life and the death-by-a-thousand-cuts demise that these economies of attention can inflict on the real-world bodies. Borne out of the memories and material legacy of Harris’s late friend and collaborator Trevor Bazile, an artist and filmmaker known for his beguiling and befuddling online output and the clout-fueled, shock-stock New People’s Cinema Club. Bazile’s sudden death in October 2021 in a sense spawned the performance. The bouncy house at the heart of the dramatic action was acquired by Bazile for NPCC with funds reportedly from controversial tech titan Peter Thiel. Harris plumbs the tension ardently online strain of afro-pessimism, and fundamental flaws of combining capital and art.

The sputtering combustion engine of Harris’s piece is a dramaturgy of failure. Failure to produce prefab artistic deliverables. Failure to create a legible lingua franca of Black joy for largely white institutional funders. Failure to grieve in a way that sprouts the proper form of feathers and flies away. “I’m Smiling, you just can’t see it,” Harris reminds us throughout the piece. As performance scholars Margaret Werry and Róisín O'Gorman remind us, failure “points beyond, by marking the limit of what is possible at a particular time and place. It historicizes, denaturalizes, helps us reflexively see the orders in which we are embedded. (If we look).” Indeed, the titular house of the piece can be seen as a laboratory for Black failure. After inflation, dancer Malcom X. Bett’s enters the castle, careening around the inflatable structure, puzzling through the recurring mantras of the piece. He flies. He jukes. Every time the house holds him. As Betts’ thoughts spin out, the space allows the ideas to bounce and ricochet alongside him. They almost become atoms, with each barreling collision creating the possibility of new elements— or perhaps blow up the world. Rather than a bang, though, the scene ends with a carefully calculated whimper. The Dimes Square girls spring to life and intervene into Bett’s kinetic reverie. They come charging into the castle, whipping out their phones, inevitably trilling “WorldStar” again and again. Almost immediately, the walls come down and air seeps out. Collected air simply can not hold the weight of appropriation. The flopping skeleton of the house consumes the performers as they continue to shout and writhe from inside. 

WorldStar.

WorldStar.

WorldStar

Learn more about Nile Harris here or here.

Show Response: Girl Mode

by Allyson Dwyer

Kate McGee is living in 3023, knowing that the secret of our reality is that it's virtual and by design, always has been. She has crafted a game that is actually a moving poem, a textured movie. Have you ever wondered what it's like to embody a smash cut? Is this how Princess Zelda experiences Hyrule? I have always hated my body, always longed to experience an ethereal existence, fed no doubt by a digital addiction. Still, I was hesitant on VR, because all I was shown were video games, products, objectives. Then on an unsuspecting weekday, Kate placed the portal on my eyes, and I was in a stunning chiachurso world, looking down at my digital hands and a digital desk. I turned on the lamp, picked up a sheet of paper, and like a spell her words gave shape to things I always felt and my soul knew. The unreality of existing, a disassociation that untangles the soul across space and time, the loneliness and growth of that singular experience. My hands pulled the triggers that performed the tasks, but I was not there, I was back at SohoRep. But also, I was there, still there.

Girl Mode contains objectives, but unlike a typical video game, there is no accruing, no scoring, no boss battles. You are tasked only with living through days that bleed into one another, chasing a floating flower down a twinkling road through familiar rooms, snowy forest paths, the liminal space of the desk we dream upon. The simple act of pouring tea is an accomplishment, the weight of digitized liquid falling from my hands into the cup as I poured tea for the first time as a pixelated soul. The emotions are the objective, and in feeling them I have felt more alive this month than all year - the difference between 20 minutes of expression stretching the medium, and 200+ hours of a Nintendo product where what I accomplished will remain inside the SD card, leaving no trace of importance in my life. I'd like to go back into Kate's world, where I felt immediate intimacy with its creator and the digital crooks and nannies of my mind-palace, where I wanted to linger, where theater felt virtually realized and I felt realized, virtually.

I am looking forward to the next iteration of Kate's project, and now for a VR future built by tender artistic adventurous souls.