Category: Theater
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Toying with Irony in Volta Collective’s SALT
In SALT, a semi-interactive dance-theater work by Los Angeles-based Volta Collective, director-choreographer Mamie Green and writers Sammy Loren and Ellington Wells take on Euripides’s Medea. But, instead of featuring a vengeful enchantress and her Argonaut husband, SALT depicts two cynical artists exploiting each other to fulfill both emotional and financial desires. Jason (George Olesky) is…
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Dialogue vs Diagnosis in Matthew Gasda’s “Morning Journal”
The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, based out of a loft in Greenpoint, is known for shows that tread the line of intellectualism and indulgence. Playwright and director Matthew Gasda, who, since writing Dimes Square, has become the center of its downtown scene, introduces and closes out each production. “That’s the play,” Gasda jumps…
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Spectacular Experiments on the Great Atomic Bombreflector
La MaMa ETC and CultureHub presented Kazakhstan’s ORTA Collective in Spectacular Experiments on the Great Atomic Bombreflector.
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In Colt Coeur’s “Still,” Politics Aren’t Quite Personal Enough.
My interest in theater, and acting, came from what I perceived as an intellectual limitation in ballet, where training is relegated to silence. While discussions of technique and aesthetic preference exist, they’re usually outside of the classroom, reserved for classmate bonding, or a rare moment of closeness with an instructor. Dialectical engagement does not…
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Dispatches from Abroad: Thomas Ostermeier’s Sanitized People’s Revolution in “An Enemy of The People”
[LONDON, ENGLAND] I saw Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People at the Duke of York Theatre twice, on purpose. It’s a sublime text to be working on today, wrought with all the conflict currently comprising today’s discourse: mass movement, protest, censorship, and political representation – likely the reason why there are concurrent Broadway and…
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Ancestral cycles in Alethea Pace’s “between wave and water”
Alethea Pace’s “between wave and water,” presented recently at BAAD!, honors the memory of the ancestors buried there in a potent passage of works that resist the urge to erase America’s history of slavery. It is a purposeful, hefty juxtaposition of care-fully crafted encounters, movement through space as memorial practice, memorial practice as malleable time…
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In Katy Early’s Hysterical “Dance Nation,” Girlhood is Not for the Faint of Heart
For young women on social media and the real world alike, girlhood has become somewhat trendy in recent months. Apprehensive of adulthood, increasing numbers of individuals have clung to the rituals that characterize a girl growing up, posting videos on platforms like Instagram of birth control and group debriefs captioned simply ‘girlhood.’ Tiktoks to songs…
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Circling the Creator in “Third Law”
The audience, a group of ten people padding along in their socks, line up silently along the back wall. The glowing outline of a circle appears on the floor. Someone is brave enough to step in. This is Third Law, an immersive experience of the Adam and Eve story where you play the creator. A…
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“Surrounded by the Same Water, Divided by the Same Fields”: Owen McCafferty’s Agreement
The first songs I learned as a child were rebel songs. They recounted uprisings, hunger strikes, and rebellions; they rhymed and were easy to remember. Lyrics like “Some say the devil is dead and buried in Killarney / More say he rose again and joined the British Army” played in our kitchen and on our…
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Wooster Group’s Symphony of Rats: Delirious, Surreal, and Synthesized
The president of the United States sits in a wheelchair commode, speaking in a synthesized voice. A man in a lab coat and rat ears stands at a screen designed to look like a cardboard box. A pulsating orb in the background has grown wings and disappeared, but not before encouraging the president to do…
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The Effect: The Sublimity of Performance
If it weren’t for my erudite Anglophile cousin, I would never have known to see Lucy Prebble’s The Effect at The Shed (from March 3-March 31). An early Prebble fan, she one day turned on I Hate Suzie during one of our cousin hangs– usually involving a pronounced intake of processed foods– and despite consuming…
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Joey Merlo’s On Set With Theda Bara: An Embodied Physical Performance and A Window Into An Artist’s Mind
The first time I saw David Greenspan perform was in Adrian Einspanier’s Lunch Bunch this past spring at the 122 Community Center in the East Village. I didn’t know of him or his lore, but in the one scene in which he appeared, it was apparent he was a veteran theatrical performer with a…