New York Critic

photo by Zach Filkoff The Morality Machine is an immersive theater experience produced by Sinking Ship Creations in association with Acronym Presents and Wildrence at the space Wildrence near Canal Street. It’s an example of live-action role-play (LARP), a theatrical experience in which the audience participants fully. It’s very influenced by escape rooms and installations like Sleep No More , and it echoes what we called in the 1980’s “audience-activated theater”. There’s hardly any set text in the script, but Ryan Hart is credited for “Written Narrative”, and as far as I can see he’s the Prime Mover. The premise is this: five years ago, five people died in a medical experiment at the site. Now the families and friends have assembled there to unseal the laboratory and explore the last days of the victims. We the audience are recruited to play the attendees, each of us assigned a character (I participated as the father of a young woman). We’re led into the small, clutt...

The Fringe Encores Series brought shows from seven English-language fringe festivals this year and presented them at the Soho Playhouse here in New York. One was a two-man production of an play called Beowulf from the Limerick Festival. Sam Gibbs and Peter Buffery call comprise Autojeu Theater, and they come from London. The act is a riff on the Old English poem. Beowulf is the sort of enjoyable, inconsequential theater we expect from fringe theater. It clocks in at a little over an hour, and it’s nearly a monologue by Mr. Gibbs. Mr. Buffery play the keys on stage; he never speaks, but he has an onstage life when called upon, and part of the fun is seeing Mr. Gibbs relate to him occasionally. He sings a couple of nice songs in an appealing voice, and provides us with all sort of nice, silly sounds. Mr. Gibbs, a bearded, burly guy, plays 14 roles, primarily a macho, blustering Beowulf. “I am Beowulf’ he bellows several times. His bombast, of course, is constantly triviali...

photo by Matthew Thompson Waiting for Godot is flatly the  most important play of the 20th century (the reader will remember that the comparable monuments of modern drama were written at the end of the 19th century). Samuel Beckett’s extended metaphor, often thought abstruse, has been more victimized by wayward criticism than any other modern drama. However, Edward Albee said to me when we discussed it: “If Waiting for Godot had been set in a living room, nobody would have had any trouble with it. It's this fucking blasted heath that got in everybody's way. They see a strange setting, they see something that is not naturalistic, automatically the warning flags go up. They say ‘I'm not going to be able to understand this.’ And therefore, they can't understand it, because they're determined they're not going to.” But more about the setting later. Indeed, Waiting for Godot is the only play I know in which the characters tell us their motivation so ex...

photo:  Robert Catto Swansong is an 80-minute monologue by Conor McDermottroe presented by L. Wolf Productions as part of the United Solo Theatre Festival. It’s a study of a criminal - a punk from the word go - presented with such insight that we leave the theater simultaneously appalled by the character and sympathetic to him. This is what it means to hold the mirror up to nature, non-judgmental and charitable. Occi, as he is called, tells us about his life, starting with his habit of robbing the rich boys as a young hooligan. In the forefront of his bio is his mother, an alcoholic. “It wasn’t my fault she went back on it,” he tells us in one of the many glimpses we get of his inner life. We learn about his assaulting a civil servant and his ensuant psychiatric hospitalization, during which he was “awfully worried about Mammy.” After her death, Occi tells us “She’s with me all the time, in my sleep and all.” He takes work on a fishing trawler, on which he assaults hi...

photo by Untitled Theater Company No. 61 JR Brinkley was a Kansas doctor - faux doctor, actually - in the 1920’s who gained fame with a cure for erectile dysfunction: implanting goat testicles in his patients. He was so celebrated that he ran for governor and won the popular vote, but his opponent won the election on a technicality, praise God (votes misspelling his name were discarded). He was ultimately exposed, discredited and convicted of the obvious crimes. An American success story indeed. Edward Einhorn has based his play The Resistable Rise of JR Brinkley on this unlikely biography, and it’s been produced by The Untitled Theater Company No. 61 as part of FringeNYC. It’s a terrific production. Mr. Einhorn, who himself directs, employs a cast of five actors/musicians on a nearly bare stage with a backdrop. Included in the show are country songs - real country songs, bluegrass maybe - that Mr. Einhorn has revised from authentic tunes with new lyrics, making the show a...

photo by Mike Cantarella The theater of the absurd is alive and well, thank you. I don’t use the term in the loose sense, as applied randomly to nearly everything written after World War Two that’s not realism. I use it in the strict sense, le théâtre de dérision , in which nonsense is baked into the form of the play as a philosophy. I’m speaking of Normandy Sherwood’s play Ruffles, or a Progression of Rakes , recently produced by and at The Tank. The substance of this terrific play, such as it is, concerns a vaguely 18th-century dandy (Florian, played by Ean Sheehy) who scoops up a stable boy and makes him a sort of servant-cum-psychoslave. The young person (played by Bear Speigel) is made to wear ruffles around his neck - hence his new name. Sometimes the script sounds like Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano , and there’s an allusion to Genet’s The Maids when Florian has Ruffles engage in some role-playing with a row of silent maid-servants watching. The period is inconsisten...

photo by Russ Rowland The Hysteria of Dr. Faustus , produced by The Seeing Place Theater at The Paradise Factory, is yet another turn on the Faustus myth. It’s written by Brandon Walker, who also plays the title role, and it’s directed by Erin Cronican, who also plays Wagner and Mephistopheles. The play opens with the 80-year-old Heinrich Faustus addressing his Wittenberg class (us). He storms off after some inexplicable student heckling. When he’s at his home desk we meet his assistant, Wagner. Wagner is transformed into Mephistopheles and the good doctor makes his famous pact (he chooses the “highlight package”, for impatient people). After a quick trip to the bathroom to appreciate himself (and to let Mr. Walker remove his make-up), he’s transformed to age 30, which he will remain for 24 years. Heinrich Faustus becomes Henry Faust, English writer (although the actual, unfortunate progenitor of the myth was named Johann Faust). The plot centers on Faust’s ruining a you...

credit: Eileen Meny Photography What a wonder Salome is! Oscar Wilde wrote it in French in 1891. His infamous crush, Lord Alfred Douglas, translated it into English, but Wilde was so dissatisfied with his work that, some critics tell us, he essentially translated it again. At any rate, the Lord Chamberlin suppressed the London production (which would have starred Sarah Bernhardt) and the play premiered in France. It’s unabashedly hyperbolic, deliberately overwritten, as extravagant and overblown as dramatic prose can be. Wilde tells us everything six times. What style is this? It’s aestheticism - aka decadence . It represents the intersect of melodrama and exoticism. The script is as heavy as a fruitcake and great fun as well, and I don’t believe Wilde was entirely serious. The reader will be familiar with the Biblical story: Herod tells his step-daughter, Salome, that if she’ll dance for him, he’ll give her anything she asks for. She dances the Dance of the Seven Veil...

photo by Frictionville Studio Shadow puppetry holds flat, almost two-dimensional puppets behind a screen. A lamp behind them projects their moving shadows on to the screen, and we, the happy audience, see the shadows form the other side. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre tells us that shadow puppetry in the Middle East was used to avoid the censors: “Shadow puppet theatre similar to that found today throughout the East and South-East Asia was probably introduced to the Middle East at the time of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. … Their [shadow puppets’] method of manufacture helped them deal with basic orthodox Islamic objections to their existence. Shadow puppet makers were able to circumvent these objections by pointing out that since the figures were perforated with holes, they no longer represent animate beings.” Mercifully, Hamid Rahmanian doesn’t have to contend with censors. An Iranian-born artist, he’s conceived, designed and directed an elaborate shadow pupp...

photo by Kait Ebinger The  Scandinavian  American Theater Company is presenting a solo play by Lisa Langseth called Beloved at The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row. The actress, Elinor DiLorenzo, presents us with Katerina, a rather common young woman who gets scooped up by a high-class orchestra conductor named Adam after she takes a job as a receptionist at the concert hall. She tells us about Mathias, the guy she used to live with, and the step-by-step development of her relationship with Adam that makes her leave him.   Katerina’s not well-educated to the arts, but she falls in love with classical music, particularly Mahler, and her seduction by Adam is just one element of this larger life transition she’s telling us about. Playwright and actress do a great job of showing us more of Katerina than she can see herself. She tells us repeatedly that she’s not stupid. Her monologue is not sprinkled but rather iced with obscenities (rather overly so). When she tells u...