Soapbox: Objects in Motion (July 2026)

By Reuven Glezer

It is perhaps decently known that I see a lot of work around New York’s performance scene, which has done wonders for my psyche. This “column” covers a smattering of work I saw this dying July, as I waded through wildfire haze, diarrhea parasites, and the tears of Argentina supporters. 

WHAT A WORLD! WHAT A WORLD!

Any queer worth their salt is, at some level, something better than a “cinephile”. A glamorous cinematic presence is weaved into our conscious minds, the glow of the screen gently wafting from our ears if you catch us in the right light. Maybe you watched Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) with your cultured grandmother, maybe you went to your first rep screening as an undergraduate and caught The Earrings of Madame de… (1953). Eric Marlin’s play is a shit-eating grin inducer for those of us who love the movies and ping-pong with our peers about the queerness burned onto film. The title itself, a line made famous in The Wizard of Oz (1939), readies us for melodrama. This is not a melodrama. This is two performers, Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg, motioning through a gray no-man’s land that could be 1) an empty rehearsal studio, 2) the crappy employee space of a movie theater stripped of furniture, 3) student lounge of an underfunded state university, but really anywhere you and your compatriots might bicker about the merits of art. They’re readying themselves for a drag reimagining of The Pearl of My Oyster (1943) and also starring in The Pearl of My Oyster (1943) and also watching and also watching the drag reimagining and perhaps many more as they bring so much life to themselves that it’s almost an existential tizzy. Who hasn’t been so affected by art that they conclude - 

“i’m such a bad homosexual

like i wanna be effortless and composed and gritty and authentic and vicious and terrifying and

nuanced and cosmopolitan and salty and wondrous and glittering and multifaceted and

sensual and seductive and seducing and wild and free.”

If the authenticity is buried deep within, Ilana Khanin’s artful production excavates. Layer by layer of light, proppage, and a bit of metatheatrical fun brings the work closer to an unknowable surface and then, at last, the drag performance which volleys between camp, recreation, & transformation in a way the best drag does. 

“did i miss it?” 

I sure didn’t. 

WHAT A WORLD! WHAT A WORLD! ran as a Tank Core Production from July 9th to August 2nd. 

Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Object Permanence

Nico Krell’s latest unclassifiable work (dance-theater feels reductive, frankly) plays games with us. At the top of the show, Krell informs us that in place of blackout, an actor will clap and we’ll close our eyes - when we hear another clap, we’ll return to the world. Krell teaches us the move, and then leads us into the work. Object permanence is why you can play peek-a-boo with a toddler and elicit joy from their little selves; in this case, reality ceases to function within the normal parameters as we watch seven performers play their own games, make their own time worth it, as some great and terrible “it” menaces them, unseen to us. 

Fun fact: when I was a child, I had (and still somewhat retain) a deep-seated fear of houses with all the lights off. Flash forward some twenty-odd years later, and I would walk through the blocks of massive Victorians in neighboring Ditmas Park during the early days of the pandemic to ease my mind. I hurried past those homes at nightfall, filled with the chatter of true-crime reports of horrible happenings behind closed doors. I would wonder if my homeowner neighbors were sacrificing goats in the basement and summoning poltergeists, some kind of Brooklyn Amityville Horror crossover.

Object Permanence is based off a very real case of child abuse and neglect. When we closed our eyes to “blackout”, my mind leapt to the unimaginable things happening to these children away from sight. The simplicity of the ask, to listen for the clap and join or unjoin ourselves from the play-world, becomes its own dramaturgical filter. Seven talented, ambulatory performers appear and reappear and vanish and move strangely by the door at the far end of the Kestrels space, beyond which (from my vantage point) you only saw darkness and glimmers of hanging lights. This lo-fi dungeon is suffused with an uneasy, almost revolting, silence. We hear whispers (pre-recorded and not), the creak of the door, the almost-sneezes. In what world is a sneeze a source of fear? We can all fathom an answer, but there’s no room to say it in the hour-long performance. Your oxygen can be a combustive agent. Someone’s gotta be the victim this time. 

The worst part? We’ll still be playing a game of peek-a-boo once we step back out into the Gowanus night. I get a beer with a friend visiting from Philly. I look out from the bar window. I wonder who’s missing. 

Object Permanence ran at Kestrels from July 17-19. 

Sydney Chow and Marc Anthony Gutierrez - Photo Ellie Gravitte

Foosball

In Douglas Stuart’s John of John, the titular character is beaten by a father who later looks upon what he’s done to his son and is hit with a deep, soul-shattering regret over his actions and the prospect of losing his son. In Sean Czarnecki’s promising Foosball, Will Ehren’s JJ is hit by his father (Forest Malloy), who comes to regret it and is haunted by, you guessed it, the prospect of losing his son. I can’t help but compare the two works that I experienced so closely together by sheer coincidence - a small town that chokes those who live there, a community that can't quite see what you’re going through, the cold of Scotland and Michigan. The kicker here is that JJ is caught in a situation with his “auntie” Evelyn, an old friend of the family who acts as a surrogate mother but, more importantly, is raping him.

I don’t use this word lightly, it’s all very May December and Last Summer, though without the former’s humor and the latter’s atmosphere, but it’s the situation at hand and JJ, like many a lonely and troubled child on stage and screen, thinks his rapist is his friend and his lover. Evelyn (Mia Vallet) is lonely, overworked, and the only maternal figure JJ has ever known, but therein lies the trap that keeps him from metabolizing just what’s going on here. 

Herein lights the strength of Czarnecki’s play, a fine and sturdy work that pops a bubble in JJ’s dreams of moving in with Evelyn, and kept anchored by a very actor-friendly production helmed by Claire Siebers. Ehren is an excellent 16-year-old, who breaks when hit, who doesn’t know what’s wrong with his arrangement, and the rest of Siebers’ cast is always moving, always careful in choice, present and capable in the cozy (and humid) Arts on Site space. The design is low-key but with wonderful touches; I was especially a fan of the lava lamp with mango-colored wax that flickered with anxiety as we black out to JJ and Evelyn “having sex” on the couch (shoutout to Jordan Barnett for some really lovely moodiness in these lights). All of these (mostly) make up for the contrivances needed to push the avalanche down the mountain, and some of the on-the-nose choices in the work to remind us that this is about teens, about growing up. 

At one point JJ wonders if there’s another version of him out there, one that wasn’t born into poverty and stuck sleeping on a couch, badgered by an angry father and drinking cheap beer to cope. It’ll take so much to get out, so much to know what else is out there.

Foosball ran at Arts On Site from July 16th to August 1st. 

Mia Vallet. Photo by Jacqueline Silberbush.