Experimental Theater

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Burnout Paradise

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Burnout Paradise

Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.” 

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Remember This Trick

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Remember This Trick

Antisemitism, as “the world’s oldest hatred,” appears to defy time limits. It may cloak itself in the cultural norms of a particular society, but similar tropes, accusations, and treatises, sometimes tweaked, resurface in different locations. Remember This Trick, deftly directed by David Herskovits, who also doubles as sound designer, is a collaborative, thoroughly engaging exploration of antisemitism across millennia, and the resilience and survival of those who experience it.

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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

The Wooster Group’s 2017 celebrated production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons” was promoted as a “record album interpretation.” Conceived by Eric Berryman, the multimedia performance gave thrilling urgency and pulsing vitality to a recording from 1965 that featured African American work songs, spirituals, and personal anecdotes from prison. Berryman and The Wooster Group’s current piece is an exploration of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, an LP that was released by Rounder Records in 1976. While the performance has its share of exhilarating moments, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is not as stirring as the previous work. It has, regrettably, several of the hallmarks of what is described in the recording industry as “difficult second album syndrome.”

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Food

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Food

Geoff Sobelle’s Food at BAM Fisher is performance art of the most engaging kind. It provokes rumination about man’s relationship to nature, to the use of the environment, and to the distance between tilling the earth with dirty hands and the meal that arrives on a plate at home or in a restaurant. If that implies an overly serious purpose, it is brightened by Sobelle’s interactivity with his audience, his deft sleight of hand, and slapstick that veers into carnival sideshow.

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Emergence

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Emergence

Things are not as they seem,” intones Patrick Olson, the creator and driving force behind Emergence, an uncanny conceptual performance that merges art, science, music, and monologue and may well be the most original Off-Broadway show this season. Accompanied by an ensemble of four singers, three dancers, and a rock band, Olson invites theatergoers on a transformative journey that tears off the veil from familiar things and explores the deepest aspects of the human experience.

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Bioadapted

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Bioadapted

Bioadapted, a new theater piece created and directed by Tjaša Ferme, and written by James Yu and Alexis Roblan, is a hybrid play drawn from sources as disparate as a 2020 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that was written by ChatGPT; transcripts of panels of scientists discussing the subject; and scientists interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). Turning transcripts into drama has been around a long while—from Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice and Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde to the recent Is This a Room, which took dialogue verbatim from FBI interviews with Reality Winner.

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The Half-God of Rainfall

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The Half-God of Rainfall

Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic revenge fantasy about a basketball superstar who was born as a consequence of Zeus’s raping of a mortal woman. This multilayered piece uses poetry, music, and a mix of Greek and Yoruba mythology for a lyrical meditation on power, patriarchy, and the black feminist response to the #MeToo movement. 

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One Woman Show

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One Woman Show

“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.

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In Corpo

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In Corpo

Ben Beckley and Nate Weida’s In Corpo is a new sci-fi musical about human connection that will make some theatergoers smile and others wince. Directed by Jess Chayes, it draws on Franz Kafka’s unfinished novels The Castle and The Trial, Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and the artists’ own experiences navigating the corporate world. The piece grapples with corporate overreach, invasive technologies, and unresponsive bureaucracies to satirize how working in the corporate world can stymie one’s heart and soul. Its principals’ names, “K” and “Bartleby” (played by Austin Owens Kelly), are borrowed directly from Kafka (K. is the hero of The Castle; Josef K. of The Trial) and Melville’s 1853 short story.

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Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo and Juliet

The National Asian American Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet may just go down as the season’s most misdirected production. Employing Hansol Jung’s modern-verse adaptation as its text, codirectors Jung and Dustin Wills no doubt intended to revamp Shakespeare’s tragedy by leaning into its comedy to point up the darker aspects. But what one gets is a travesty of the play.

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Being Chaka

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Being Chaka

Part ghost story, part coming-of-age drama, part memory play, Being Chaka—written by Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi and Nalini Sharma—is a provocative investigation into racism in America. The surreal plot centers on the character Chaka (Kahiem Rivera), a black 16-year-old transfer student at East Prep High School in Manhattan. As the action unfolds, the audience will see him continually shifting between reality and dreamscapes, with the line between the two worlds often blurring. 

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Regretfully, So the Birds Are

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Regretfully, So the Birds Are

As the loopy title suggests, Regretfully, So the Birds Are is theater of the absurd. Julia Izumi’s play concerns three New Jersey siblings adopted from Southeast Asia by a Caucasian couple (Gibson Frazier and the incomparable Kristine Nielsen) who’ve refused to tell the children where they were born. The parents’ rationale is that, if their adoptive offspring don’t know where they come from, they’ll feel their “origins are the Whistler family” rather than separate, far-off countries.

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The Hunting Gun

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The Hunting Gun

The Hunting Gun, an avant-garde piece of theater by Serge Lamothe, is a remarkably mesmerizing work, but it also presents challenges to a viewer: only one of its two performers speaks, and then it’s entirely in Japanese (there are surtitles in English). Adapted from a novel of the same name by Yasushi Inoue, the work begins with a prologue. An author, heard over a loudspeaker, recites a poem called Hunting Gun—written about a man with “a double-barreled Churchill.” The author subsequently received a letter from Josuke Misugi, who claims to be the man who inspired the poem. Out of the blue, he tells the author, he is sending him three letters in the hopes that he (or perhaps just someone, anyone) will understand his life.

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Chekhov’s First Play

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Chekhov’s First Play

The Irish experimental theater company Dead Centre is taking a wrecking ball to Chekhov’s unwieldy five-hour play Platonov (also known as Untitled Play) with its new metatheatrical work, Chekhov’s First Play. Devised and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, this 70-minute production is a radical reworking of the original four-act drama, playfully magnifying its follies and the overreach of its young playwright, who penned it before he was 20.

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Hedda Gabler

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Hedda Gabler

Just in time for Halloween, the Off-Off-Broadway troupe Bedlam is spicing up its presentation of Hedda Gabler with a Walpurgisnacht dance. That unexpected choreographic interpolation, with flashing lights, thump-y music, and Hellfire Club costumes, might strike the fancy of Sigmund Freud but would certainly surprise the play’s author, Henrik Ibsen—and perhaps also Jon Robin Baitz, whose adaptation, based on Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey’s translation, the production utilizes.

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My Onliness

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My Onliness

Echoing through the halls and into the New Ohio Theatre’s performance space is My Onliness, a daring new experimental work co-produced by the collective One-Eighth Theater, the New Ohio Theatre, and IRT Theater. Written by New Ohio’s artistic director, Robert Lyons, My Onliness takes elements inspired by Polish dramatist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and transforms them into what One-Eighth declares as the New Absurd. And wonderfully absurd it is.

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H*tler’s Tasters

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H*tler’s Tasters

Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.

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Cyrano de Bergerac

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Cyrano de Bergerac

When Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac opened in 1897, it was hailed not only for its poetry but for its elaborate sets—one for each of the five acts, from bakery to battlefield—and for its poetry and grandiose passions. Martin Crimp’s version of the story of unrequited love, produced and directed by Jamie Lloyd at BAM, has only the faintest glimmers of any exaltation. More often it’s simply disappointing.

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Take Shape

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Take Shape

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.

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Oratorio for Living Things

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Oratorio for Living Things

Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian’s new music-theater piece, was supposed to open on March 30, 2020. Two weeks before that, New York City’s playhouses closed precipitately in response to Covid-19. On the second anniversary of the aborted premiere, Oratorio has returned. After 24 months of isolation and loss, there’s a miraculous feel to this piece of theater.

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