Off Broadway Week begins today
All five shows that I reviewed this past week (see below) could be described as avant-garde theater. But what does avant-garde even mean in 2024? It’s a phrase that goes back two centuries yet is still promiscuously worked into the latest headlines (e.g. “Janelle Monáe Wears Circular Avant Garde Mini Dress”…”San Francisco Ballet Enters Avant-Garde Era at Glamourous Opening..”)
If all five shows are what you could call experimental – or downtown, innovative, out of the mainstream – they are so different from one another that seeing them together one begins to get a bestiary of current cutting-edge theater.
One (“The Following Evening”) is produced by two long-time theater companies, each led by a married couple, The Talking Band and 600 Highwaymen — the former labeling itself “a cornerstone of New York City’s avant-garde theater community,” the latter also considered part of that community but preferring to talk about their “radical approaches… at the intersection of theater, dance, contemporary performance, and civic encounter.”
Another (“I Love You So Much I Could Die”), a project by another couple, Mona Pirnot and Lucas Hnath, focuses on unusual techniques of storytelling.
A third (“Bark of Millions”) was “queer”—explicitly labeled that by its creative team, led by Taylor Mac. But the word has come to mean something more than just two people of the same gender sexually attracted to one another; and not just gender bending. It is also something closer to its original meaning though no longer meant as an insult. Rather, it seeks to establish queer as the new normal, which is to argue that there is no normal; we are all fluid — ambiguous, spontaneous, searching. It’s this searching that helps define the avant-garde.
Finally, there are the two pieces that advance a fairly recent redefinition of theater — as no longer necessarily taking place in person on a stage. “Russian Troll Farm” began as a livestream during the pandemic shut-down and is now Off-Broadway; “My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion” began on stage; I saw it last week livestreamed.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Bark of Millions
Bark of Millions” is a concert of fifty-five original songs, each inspired by a queer figure in history, put together by the same team that produced the once-in-a-generation “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”: … it is astonishing in many ways – not least because of the breadth and virtuosity of Matt Ray’s music melded to Taylor Mac’s words, and ambition. Full Review
downtown theater piece about what it’s been like to do downtown theater, featuring Talking Band, the 50-year-old theater company led by Paul Zimet and his wife Ellen Maddow….[told] through scattershot scenes and songs, reminiscences, reveries, reflection, and re-creation…Those with the patience to sit attentively through the seeming randomness and occasional weirdness of “The Following Evening”…are rewarded with small, savory moments of a life lived while making theater Full Review
Russian Troll Farm
Four years after it was first produced as digital theater, “Russian Troll Farm” is now opening as an in-person Off-Broadway play, which loses the benefit of its original imaginative staging . And while Russia is still up to no good, its aggression is much more blatant now … if Sarah Gancher’s play thus hits differently now – neither as direct nor as timely — it still offers an intelligent, informative and sometimes entertaining take on a newfangled weapon in the modern arsenal against liberal… Full Review
I Love You So Much I Could Die
In this experiment in storytelling, Mona Pirnot spends just over an hour with her back to the audience, intermittently picking up an acoustic guitar and singing a song (she does this five times), but mostly sitting still at her desk while a text-to-speech program on a laptop recites in a mechanical male voice what she’s written…I can see some theatergoers dismissing the way Pirnot and Hnath tell her story as gimmicky; avant-garde affectation… But I found much of it unexpectedly moving,
My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion
After Russia invades her native Ukraine, Olga Ivanovna, 82 years old…flies a supersonic jet over the Kremlin. If those scenes are not even the most fanciful – the fantasies become more over-the-top as the play progresses — the layered script and a fine cast allow us to see Olga Ivanovna as a real woman, a formidable one, unyieldingly committed to end the invasion that began two years ago this month. Her strength and resilience have been forged from years of trauma and hardship. Her story, we realize, is the story of all Ukrainians, and of Ukraine. Full Review
The Week in New York Theater News
Tyne Daly (left), unexpectedly hospitalized, withdrew from the Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable (at Roundabout’s newly renamed Todd Haimes Theater) which will now star Amy Ryan (right) as Sister Aloysius. John Patrick Shanley’s play will now open on March 7th, a week later than originally scheduled.
Six new feature films and 28 short films will be showcased at the Indie Theater Festival, taking place February 15 – 18 at A.R.T./New York. The festival “presents work from independent theater artists that are defying labels and branching out into film and digital media.”
The 2023 movie musical adaptation of Broadway’s The Color Purple will join the streaming network Max beginning February 16. (my review.)
The Jonathan Larson Grant, awarded to exceptional emerging musical theatre composers, lyricists, and librettists, or writing teams, was given this year to
singer and composer Daniel Henri Emond (Kill The Whale: A Musical Odyssey)
composer, lyricist and librettist Julian Hornik (Tenn)
composing and performing team The Kilbanes (Weightless)
performer, writer and director Larry Owens (Larry Owens’ Sondheimia — who, you may recall, was the lead of “A Strange Loop” Off-Broadway)
composer and lyricist Veronica Mansour (Lighthouse)
and the songwriting team of Jacinta Clusellas, Tatiana Pandiani and Melis Aker (Azul).
Each will receive grants of almost $15,000. A special concert, showcasing the past four years of Jonathan Larson Grant winning artists, will be held on March 25 at Florence Gould Hall (55 E 59th Street.)
From ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ to ‘Leopoldstadt,’ ‘Our Class’ and ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ a struggle to explain the scourge of antisemitism, by former Washington Post critic Peter Marks (The Forward.)
“The subversive vision of Michael R. Jackson” (Atlantic)
The Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in essence a profile of the playwright of “A Strange Loop,” including his nuanced and evolving anti-woke views, calling him “one of the most incisive social critics of our time. His views are well-established for those of us who have read (or conducted) previous interviews with him or paid attention to his play, especially “White Girl in Danger“) Two of Jackson’s quotes from the article:
“The number of people in the theater world who used George Floyd’s dead body to pivot to inequity in the theater world is the most hair-raising thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I’ve seen so many opportunities just handed out, doled out to all these people in the name of giving them these resources, but there’s nothing being done to help them develop and to make a quality product,”
A new musical uses sign language to tell the story of a deaf soldier (Washington Post)
A play “Private Jones” at Signature Theater of Arlington loosely inspired by Gomer Jones, a deaf sniper who fought in World War I, uses Deaf and hard of hearing actors.
Once Upon a Mattress, then and now: (NY Times) Sarah Wildman’s mother saw the original with Carol Burnett nine times. “I asked her how she could afford it. “It was under $10 for orchestra, third row,” she told me.” (Tickets for the Encores! concert series, which recently mounted Once Upon a Mattress for two weeks in a supposedly stripped-down version, range from $45 to $165)
The Week’s Theater Video
Also check out Broadway at Super Bowl LVIII: Wicked, Alicia, Reba, which includes a link to the full halftime show, and several Broadway-adjacent commercials.
