Philip Santos Schaffer pulls back the curtain and introduces himself as “your server and savior” to me and the only other member of the audience. After chatting idly for a while, he asks if we’re thirsty. “Tonight, we’re serving only the finest NYC tap,” he declares as he turns on the faucet.
Schaffer is performing in “The End of the World Bar and Bathtub,” an hour-long play that takes place in a bathtub. As I write in my article in TDF Stages, “Have You Ever Seen a Show in a Bathtub?”, it is one of a series of five theater pieces, collectively entitled “Small Plays For Giants,” created this year by an innovative five-year-old New York theater company called WalkUpArts, and all written by Schaffer, one of the company’s four co-artistic directors.
Three of the five shows took place over the past few months before a regular-sized Off-Off Broadway audience at The Tank, a normal theater on West 36th Street. I stumbled upon the first of these, The Jester and the Dragon, when it ran back in February, a multilayered play about an aging, arthritic finger puppeteer giving her final performance of a children’s fairy tale.
“The End of the World Bar and Bathtub” is by appointment only. You supply the bathroom; WalkUpArts supplies the show.
