Festivus: Theater for the Rest of Us

by Reuven Glezer

Festival season has come & gone and by all accounts, it was glorious. Of course it was - some of the most exciting exhibitions in performance, theater, dance, & indescribable mutations take root in New York like rats in summer. January becomes the grand convergence of boundary-pushing work you will rarely see elsewhere in the hopes it will come to a performing arts center near you. I was on a lighter track this year, having seen only twelve works across four different tentpoles (Exponential, Under the Radar, PROTOTYPE, and wonderful newcomer The Get Together). Some of you freaks made it out every night, and I salute you. I, for one, am hopeful for a handful of remounts to get my own freak flag aloft again (*cough* Creature/Comfort, my utopias, ¿¡¡simon negs≈≈>:(:{{**) but here’s an incomprehensive smattering of work I did interface with that delighted, fascinated, and tickled, with musings attached. 

i'm going to take my pants off now

You walk into Life World and you’ve gotta put on some booties. Me? I have Hobbit feet and accidentally tear the first pair so someone kindly passes me a larger size. Crisis averted. You walk into the space and are greeted with turntables and green shag carpeting, surrounded by mylar balloons (Carolyn Mraz’s production design befits a stylish bedroom-cum-mind palace). This is Ann Marie Dorr’s latest, and you will find yourself face-to-face with them for an hour of your time in one of the most intimate theatrical evenings I’ve had in a long minute. Bonus points to any producer who brings this back: keep the 10pm shows. This is perfect alchemy for a late-night showing. Composed of kindnesses requested by Dorr, who initiates the show by knocking out the lights and changing in the dark with a quickness that immediately syncs you into the rhythm of the work. You might be asked to shine a light on Ann Marie, you might be asked to spank them, you will be lifted into the mind of someone who wonders if they, like the cod fish who suffered in the imperialist trade wars between Iceland and the United Kingdom, can be lifted to the light and be seen, worms and all. We’re all caught in the Þorskastríðin of the self, so why not reach for one another, pectoral fin-to-pectoral fin in the dark waters? And we will be in the dark, plunged and only guided by music and Dorr’s voice, as the mylar picks up any stray lightbeam and hits back like the eye of an undersea denizen. At the risk of overdoing it with the sea-related analysis, I did watch this work’s composition unfold in a method that reminded me of Maggie Nelson’s “propositions” in her seminal Bluets (and, frankly, manifest in a work better than Nelson has written in the last five years or so) - radical intimacy, but with an originality that outmatches what feels like a world constantly funneled through a lens of “intimacy.” What’s worth sharing in the social media new world order? What’s intimate when everything is surveilled? Maybe all we need is to listen, to wonder about each other in the inky black as a 12-inch LP of T. Rex plays. As we (and everyone in my audience did) offer a kindness to Dorr, I wondered if this energy would maintain after. I walked out of Life World in the 27 degree weather, late in the eve out from the 10pm show, and I was offered a kindness - I was given a lift home.  

TRAD

Hannah Mitchell, in the marvelous TRAD, gets trapped (by the patriarchal forces of American Christianity). This is a good thing. I think I have a particular affinity for this because I did grow up around people who would become the Orthodox Jewish version of wannabe tradwives (who value modesty but are quick to show off engagement rings in the WhatsApp groupchat, if you know you know), but Mitchell does some absolutely wacky shit here and I kind of wanted to be a fly on the wall for every Loading Dock audience. If you aren’t familiar with tradwifery (god bless you, honestly), it’s an especially present phenomenon on TikTok where women document their “traditional” lifestyles in an alt-right ecosystem that values women as breeding units and indentured servants. As a tradwife, and this isn’t the case, this is devotion to faith and home. It is, uniquely, a bastardization of a return to nature philosophy that is insidious but, understandably, deeply addictive for internet anthropologists. Hannah Mitchell’s tradwife is raising several children, her cheery voicemail-leaving husband is MIA (classic), and she’s got another bun on the way. The work is a fun metatheatrical double burden, Mitchell messes with us as she occupies an eerie psychic space, a grand white curtain with a pasture in the background (courtesy of Jonathan Schatzberg), whose hinges loose as the evening progresses. I can’t stop thinking about this moment where we were all asked to pluck a petal from a rose, only for another rose to emerge for Mitchell to demonstrate its frailty and preciousness - she smashes it against the wall and reader, I howled. The vibe, as they say, shifted. I’m reluctant to spoil what happens in the back half of TRAD in the hopes (as I have for all the works!) that it comes back, but there comes this strange, time-merging duet featuring a birth danced to Moondog’s “Edelweiss” and Kiki Milner’s Little House on the Prairie-coded idol of aspiration for our heroine. It’s sudden and dramaturgically risky but a sudden moment of energetic calm that merges the scenic work, Jacqueline Scaletta’s mesmerizing lights and Ethan Lindhout’s wonderful sound design in a stunning tableaux. Praise be.

Time Passes (for Ellen Brody)

I am sensing an aquatic theme to my choices but nevertheless, I persist. Tiny bias alert, I collaborated with the Goat Exchange (theater-making duo Mitchell Polonsky & Chloe Claudel) on the first iteration of this, but I had no idea the dimensions (literally and spiritually) this would take and was pleasantly surprised. Merging all of Ellen Brody’s lines from the Spielberg megahit Jaws and the Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (specifically the chapter that grants the work its name), an unlikely mashup becomes an unusual meditation on a kind of Anglo-American anxiety about the ever-changing world. Serenity is drowned in blood, ghosts pass through us, and there’s danger in the water. Woolf’s work is inextricably tied to the sea itself, and Jaws is nature itself plundering the American idyll of its summer leisures, and so the Goat Exchange link these two through American cinema’s unsung hero, Ellen Brody. Chloe Claudel is our Ellen and our Woolf-ian narrator, and the way Claudel can change tones at the drop of a hat is astounding. One minute she’s disassembling a whole chicken and talking to us/Quint about how he’s into sharks, and the next her voice becomes this hollow, entoning phantom as it motions through Woolf’s words. There’s power in the way a performer doesn’t walk a fine line so much as jumps through these thespian hoops into another arena, and Claudel pulls it off with finesse. The show’s design is the real shark here, while there is a literal 30-foot shark that has lines (albeit in a “the adults in Peanuts” indecipherable garbling way), there are lighthouses and gems across the cavernous scenic work (from Forest Entsminger) that give the work the energy of a nautical museum, while Abigail Sage’s lighting feel like observing the sun from the epipelagic zone of the open sea, and the lost, unappreciated billows of daylight in an abandoned home all together. Olivia Vaughn Hern’s costumes here are a delight, from Ellen Brody’s blue-and-pink dress to the very 70s swimwear for the beach scenes. It’s a mashup that takes a willingness to get a little ridiculous, perhaps no better exemplified than Claudel singing an Edith Piaf number accompanied by a goblin shark on the piano (the very talented Mateo Lincoln). A new world crashes open like a wave, we are neither in Woolf-land or Spielberg-land. We’re in the land of time passing, to and fro. 

Watch Me Walk

Anne Gridley would like you to know how to help a disabled person who has fallen. The answer is simple, ask if they need help and if the answer is no, take the no. She falls and asks us this during her fun, illuminating, and heartfelt semi-solo work Watch Me Walk, and observes with mischievous eyes as she rises herself and congratulates us on listening to instruction. Gridley is educator-scamp-queen of the castle in her wonderful play, directed with fun and aplomb by Eric Ting. Gridley’s work is form-melding and thematically tight, as befitting a co-founder of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, but it’s also the life of an artist and all the life within her as a disabled person. Her disease is incredibly rare (and unforgettable once you’ve got the catchy tunes about her “orphan disease”, from Noah Lethbridge, stuck in your head) but inherited, at one point Gridley tries to find out which generation it originated from but it becomes less of a climb up the family tree and more a leap from canopy to canopy in search of answers to questions that were inconceivable in the generations before. Gridley is here to educate you about Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP) but she’s also here to walk through herself the person, herself the scion of a family with its own secrets and unanswerable mysteries, and to show us the person she is. Her pet duck, Ping (played by Alex Gibson, one of the show’s “Adonises”), tells us of Death, a process, “We are actually dying every day, every moment. Like we are getting close to death every every moment. And...it is a process.” In this segment, he’s describing the failing of motor neuron function, but he’s just as much talking about the inevitable boogeyman of life and how that journey isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a tunnel-vision endpoint. To live, body and all, is an eternal accumulation of (epi)genetic luck and the time you take up in the present. There are almost no photos of Gridley’s grandmother, Mary Virgil, where HSP can be found in its earliest example in her clan, but there are plenty of Anne, who can still dance and do tricks and fall from ladders. In the most moving section of the show, she performs vaudeville cane routines with the endless ooze of charm, and fellow Adonis, Keith Johnson. Johnson messed up slightly on a move the night I saw the show, and who can blame him? He’s only human. That’s life.

Bellow

I truly had no intention of seeing Bellow. I got a free ticket through UTR’s free ticket drive (thank you Mayor Mamdani) and wanted to kill time on a Tuesday evening. What I thought would be a rote bio-play was my own cynicism talking, because this was a Brokentalkers production, an Irish theatre troupe that utilizes unconventional collaborators to create uniquely unconventional work. In this case, the main collaborator is Danny O’Mahony, accordionist of the finest order and a master of traditional Irish music - while it claims to be biographical, it is profoundly anti-biographical and somehow more honest, more spindly, and one of the best things I’ve ever seen. I was (joyfully) taken aback at how Feidlim Cannon poked fun at the very process of devising in a way I found, unlike other examples of self-deprecating depictions of theatrical process, genuinely critical of its potential and clear-eyed about its inherent pretension. There’s no true way to articulate art and life in an easy package, so Bellow goes in another direction. It’s, in many ways, a hagiography of traditional Irish music itself, but also snapshots and slices of a life devoted to craft. Partway through, Cannon and O’Mahony admit they had trouble going forward and cast a dancer, Emily Kilkenny Roddy, to collaborate on the work and see what directions they can go in. Roddy becomes Danny’s avatar, as well the avatar of his music, at one point demonstrating the process she used to try and figure out a choreographic language for Danny’s music and when she shows us what she’s got, my jaw dropped. I’m not, to my detriment, great at describing dance but her movements felt like I watched the groans and tones of an accordion given a human soul. Roddy puts on a mask and becomes a young Danny later on and, in one of the show’s darkest moments, moves as Danny himself describes the awful things that will happen to his body in the years to come. The work is a portrait of an artist (not to get all Joyce about it) becoming themselves, not through dates and times, but through the spirit of the art itself. In the show’s final moment, Danny plays us a tune as Cannon and Roddy surround him with huge photo cutouts of what I can only assume are other masters of Irish music and the lights shift so slowly until it is as if Danny himself is just another photo, playing with such stillness, and then Sarah Jane Shiels’ lights roar with color and remind us this is a living master, this is a world that breathes like the accordion itself. I only cried, like, four times.