In the first play officially opened to the public at the Cherry Lane under the ownership of movie studio A24, Natalie Palamides portrays a man and a woman simultaneously, an exercise in gender-switching slapstick that normally would last no longer than a Weekend Update guest spot on Saturday Night Live. But “Weer” goes on for more than 80 minutes, and it goes where no one-man/woman clown act has ever gone before; ever-escalating into both fake and actual nudity, simulated sex, simulated birth, bloody violence — sometimes hilarious, occasionally shocking. It is a bravura/shameless performance and an exercise in anarchy and inventiveness, as much by the designers of the sets and props as by Palamides the actor/actress/writer/director who smashes them all up. Long before the finish, the small stage at the Cherry Lane is littered with roses, talcum powder, a deer carcass, photography equipment, old car parts.
If I found “Weer” uncomfortable, it’s mostly because it’s the show chosen as “the theater” that inaugurates the new Cherry Lane Theater.
“Weer” has a plot of sorts, or at least a timeline, chronicling a testy, sexy, sordid relationship between Christina, in pink dress and stringy fall hairpiece, always facing stage right, and Mark, in a lumberjack’s plaid shirt, black bouffant hair and greased-on eight-day stubble, always facing stage left. We first meet them on New Year’s Eve 1999 – right before Y2K, when people worried the world might turn upside down. Mark and Christina are having a knock-down, drag out fight (a cliché, but precisely descriptive), with Christina ending up on a dark road next to that deer carcass and those car parts, bloody and unconscious after a car crash. Then Palamides gets up and turns the final 9 of 1999 upside down into a 6 (or at least tries to; the night I attended, it wouldn’t stick to the backdrop), tracing the three years of their relationship.
“Weer” debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, and it follows “Nate: A One Man Show” which also began at the Fringe, and was turned into a Netflix special in 2020. “Weer” is in one way a step up from “Nate” – it’s more elaborately staged, there is more impressive physical comedy. It’s also toned down – it includes audience interaction, but nowhere near as intrusively as “Nate” did. But it’s similar enough to make me wonder: Would the new Cherry Lane have been interested in Palamides if she hadn’t already been Netflixed?
The theater emailed people a “note from Natalie” tonight, the opening night of Weer, in which she writes:
“It is with great honor that I have the opportunity to anoint the newly refurbed Cherry Lane Theatre, the birthplace of off-broadway, with my living nightmare of a play… when I created this show my intent was to make one of the saddest and simultaneously stupidest things anyone could ever see..”
When A24 purchased the 166-theater in 2023 for ten million dollars, it kept their plans for it under wraps. Now that it’s officially opened, it’s still not completely clear what their plans are for a theater that was founded by Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1923 and premiered plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard among many others (a partial list provided by the plaque put up on the building in 2003.)
They’ve put in a screening room, and they’ve invited Jodie Foster and Spike Lee to talk about their movies. They installed a new bar in the lobby called Wild Cherry, which sells popcorn, which you are allowed to take into the theater with you. The program for “Weer” is insertedI with a fake movie ticket; I’m not sure I get the joke. (A joke I do get, I think: The program also includes a full page promoting Palamides as New York’s #1 relationship counselor – “she promises to not take sides” – and a request to email your toxic relationship story to Relationships@cherrylanetheatre.org)
A question I have as somebody who lives nearby: Will A24 – can A24 – be a good neighbor for the West Village.
Some (literal) signs so far give me pause
Will A24 — can A24 — be a good steward of what they are still calling an Off-Broadway theater? They’re a small and independent company by Hollywood standards, but they’re a behemoth compared to the rest of Off-Broadway..Rather than fitting into the ecology of Off-Broadway, will they alter it?
Can unproven works of theater with no easy route to a screen adaptation get a chance at the Cherry Lane?
Weer
Cherry Lane Theater through November 9. Update: Extended through December 21.
Running time: 80 minutes to 90 minutes (it changes each night) no intermission
Tickets: $30 – $109. Rush: $24
Written, directed and performed by Natalie Palamides
Scenic design by Gabriel Evansohn, costume design by Ashley Dudek, lighting design by Paige Seber, props design by lucas a degirolamo
