Joshua William Gelb, an award–winning pioneer in digital theater, has restaged his earliest Internet hit in what some might consider a logical next step – in person. But if I find “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (redux)” worthwhile, it’s largely because it reminds me of what Gelb achieved with his Theater of Quarantine.
“The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy” adapts a short story from Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1957 science fiction anthology, “The Star Diaries,” about the adventures of a space traveller. Egon’s spacecraft is pierced by a meteor no bigger than a lima bean. To fix the damaged rudder requires two people, but Egon is on a one-man mission. Fortunately, his rocket ship is wracked by a “time vortex,” the upshot of which is that the Egon who exists on Monday sticks around on Tuesday, meeting Tuesday’s Egon, and so forth throughout the week, crowding the spaceship with Egons, and lots of comic confusion. So many Egons would seem to make the two-man job of fixing the rudder simple, but none of the Egons get along well enough to make this happen – a satirical illustration of what must be a universal saying, that each of us is our own worst enemy.
By the time in the summer of 2020 that Gelb chose to dramatize Lem’s story, with a script by playwright Josh Luxenberg, Theater in Quarantine had already been up and running for months. Soon after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic lock-down in March, 2020, Gelb had emptied the contents of the closet in his East Village apartment, and turned the 2 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft space into a kind of performance laboratory, creating videos within it to show on a YouTube channel. “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy” was arguably his first fully developed work of theater. The one-man show was well-timed, a comment on life in solitude. It showed off Gelb and his crew’s inventiveness. It also demonstrated the previously unexplored potential of digital theater. Theater of Quarantine went on to adapt serious literature, and create impressive original works of avant-garde theater, well-past the return of in-person theater.
For the Under the Radar festival, Gelb et al seem to have simply moved his closet to the 4th Street theater, with the camera in front, and screens on either side. The set-up in effect offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he accomplishes having multiple Egons at once, all portrayed by Gelb. It’s entertaining to see the actual Gelb standing up in the closet, while the Gelb on screens to his right and to his left is lying flat on his back, or floating in air, bickering or fighting with a pre-recorded Gelb.
It’s a little like watching the video of the performance simultaneously with the behind-the-scenes video of how the performance was put together (Both videos are still on the Theater of Quarantine YouTube channel.)
But while there are some noticeable changes in the script (with a running time of 50 minutes, it’s 14 minutes longer than the original), this in-person version, “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (redux),” is similar enough to the 2020 livestream to pale beside his later, more sophisticated work. It’s largely slapstick, a piece of clever video-craft. What came to mind in seeing this show again, in person rather than virtually, was the possibly apocryphal story of the first screening of the Lumière brothers’ 1896 silent film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.” The audience was supposedly so unused to images in a motion picture that they ran in panic from the moving train that was being projected. Even if true, it seems unlikely they would have reacted the same way a second time.
The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (redux) is running through January 26.
