Mime is a silent art of storytelling that requires great physical expressiveness. It is often associated with street performers, but Broken Box Mime’s Take Shape sets a new paradigm for the art form: mime as performance for the theater. Eight vignettes range in themes from global warming to cooking and parenting. There are no props, stage design or costume changes. All the stories in Take Shape are conveyed through the highly physicalized art of pantomime.
In Housing Crisis, a lonely mime (Kristin McCarthy Parker) peeks out her window as movers come to get her belongings.
In the first vignette, Cooking with Jan, Nick Abeel decides to cook something special. He watches a YouTube video with cooking show host Jan (Becky Baumwoll). He twists, turns, and bends as he retrieves things from the cabinets. All the while, he keeps one eye on Jan, who stirs things into a pot, tasting and yammering away. All in silence. The result is a hilarious cooking endeavor that verges on chaos. But not to worry—when he misses something, he “rewinds” Jan, and off she goes physically reversing her steps as she resembles a rewound video.
Both Abeel and Baumwoll establish their gifts as mimes in this first piece. Abeel has a down-to-earth yet playful physicality, and Baumwoll, who is also the artistic director, has a no-nonsense articulation in her gestures and movements. Under her direction, the ensemble is tight and the vignettes keep moving.
In Interrupted, new parents (Jae Woo and Geraldine Dulex) finally have a moment alone. They flirt, eat, and drink. But their ensuing sexy striptease is interrupted when the baby wakes up crying. Relief is expressed in an exaggerated release of the shoulders. Will this couple ever get their romantic evening?
Cupped hands make the shape of hermit crabs in Shell. Photographs by Bjorn Bolinder.
Not all scenes are humorous. In Housing Crisis, the rent relief checks have dried up, and a lonely mime (Kristin McCarthy Parker) peeks out her window to see the movers (Abeel and Blake Haberman) coming to clear out her apartment. They are indifferent to her plight as they roughly unplug lamps and remove boxes. Abeel and Haberman are physically in sync as they indicate the heftiness of a couch. With a mouthed “1, 2, 3,” they hoist the imaginary couch up so that the audience feels the weight of it as they navigate around the tight corners of the apartment.
In Committed to a Green Future, the members of a bubbly corporate company work together in harmony. The ensemble (Abeel, Baumwoll, Ismael Castillo, Julia Cavagna, Dulex, Haberman, David Jenkins, Marissa Molnar, McCarthy Parker, Tasha Milkman, Regan Sims, and Woo), sit at desks, answer phones, and get forms signed, using pantomime for each movement. As water overtakes them, we see the slowing down of these gestures as they are engulfed.
Marissa Molnar plays a spy in Leave No Trace.
Some pieces, such as Orbit Kepler 186f and Shell, are not as theatrical as the others and lose energy in their abstraction. Leave No Trace, on the other hand, is a snappy spy story with a cast who look like they have just stepped out of an Ocean’s Eleven movie. Jack McGuire’s music, performed live, accompanies each vignette and displays an especially fun twist here with a James Bond–style soundtrack (with sound design by Bill Toles). In this vignette, actors serve as characters, buildings, props, and even as infrared rays as they fling their arms into the center and back, like giant tentacles. Molnar dodges them effectively with rolls, jumps and leaps. Will they pull off the heist successfully? Stay tuned.
Broken Box Mime, founded in 2011, seeks to redefine the medium of mime and are committed to telling stories beyond any language barriers.
Broken Box Mime’s Take Shape plays at Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres (502 West 53rd St.) through May 1. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays through Saturdays; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Sundays. Special performances are offered: “relaxed performances” on April 10, 17, and 21 have altered lights and sound for neurodiverse communities; a “global night” on April 14 is designed for those for whom English is not their first language; and an “affinity night” for the deaf takes place on April 18. Tickets ($25 advance; $30 door) are available for advance purchase by visiting brokenboxmime.com.
