Dead as a Dodo. Photograph by Erato Tzavara.
For two weeks at the beginning of January in New York, a cluster of theater festivals—including Under the Radar, Prototype, the Exponential Festival, and PhysFestNYC—stage a confetti cannon’s worth of experimental shows. This year, the first two festivals ended January 19, though some works have been extended into February. Past years have taught me to set modest expectations about intake. I wouldn’t be able to see every show, but many are short enough that you could, if you really wanted to, play calendar Tetris and squeeze two or even five into one day, as I did one Saturday. (Ticket prices also tend to be less prohibitively expensive than shows on Broadway or even sometimes Off Broadway.)
The back-to-back scheduling made for a brutal schlep, but it was worth it: During my first week in New York, I saw, among other things, a group of Russian refugee children proclaiming their love for Sarah Jessica Parker in SpaceBridge, a loose confederation of young radicals plotting yes-man-like acts of subterfuge against corporate juggernauts in Eat the Document, and a small sphere lingering ectoplasmically above a group of harmonizing humanoid rats.
This last show, Symphony of Rats, was produced by the Wooster Group and can be considered an honorary rather than official part of the festival circuit. The late Richard Foreman, who conceived the show, hovers like that electric-blue ball over much avant-garde theater. (Witness the use of voice-over or television clips or fourth-wall-pulverizing techniques currently in theatrical vogue.)
As with previous festivals, there were hits and misses … and more than a few shows “under construction” and therefore closed to review. Not everything was to my taste: Ann Liv Young’s Marie Antoinette, in which the artist berates two mentally ill collaborators and plays punitively loud music quickly wore out its provocative welcome. Another show about a man in Tehran and his imprisoned political-prisoner wife was more soporific than its subject matter seemed to promise. I also managed to be turned away by a few shows (in one case, twice by the same show!) for showing up ten minutes late, on the heels of another performance. So much for my Icarian itinerary.
The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy. Photograph by Maria Baranova.
One of the first shows I saw was a redux that caused me to quarrel with my own four-years-earlier interpretation of it. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, staged at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre, is adapted from Stanisław Lem’s time-looping tale of the same name, and originated as a filmed in its actor’s modestly sized home closet. Its premise: Egon Tichy, a hapless cosmonaut, finds himself stranded in a malfunctioning spaceship after being struck off course by “a meteor the size of a lima bean.” As his ship’s computer informs him, realigning the craft’s rudder requires two people—a cruel cosmic joke on the solitary spaceman. Happily, some of Egon’s future selves are soon manifested via a “time vortex” and take up residence in the bathroom, library, sleeping quarter, and other modular areas. Unhappily, these selves (who take their names from different days of the week) quickly turn on each other as each one attempts to assert the primacy of his own identity and keep a fingerhold on reality. The variant Egons are projected on large screens, and Joshua William Gelb, the actor who plays all versions of the cosmonaut, delivers a memorable Chaplinesque performance as he engages with his alternates through timed videography. Frying pan duels aside, the Egons’ arguments about selfhood are eminently relatable. Watching Gelb inchworm across his cramped quarters and bicker with other Egons, I relished the panache with which the show fully commits to the contingency of identity.
The Black Lodge. Photograph by Maria Baranova.
Michael Joseph McQuilken and David T. Little’s “goth industrial rock opera” Black Lodge, commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, steers us through a series of haunting mindscapes. In one, a man plays a deadly game of Russian roulette with his lover. In another, the same man is slowly mummified in clay and skewered by the woman (now dressed in a doctor’s uniform) with ethereal twigs. An unsettling scene of black-lipped, bandaged men in a desert repeats, turning up like an unlucky penny. The vignettes, which unfold on a cinema screen behind a group of live performers (the band Timur and the Dime Museum along with the Isaura String Quartet), all seem to orbit the man’s abiding regret over killing his beloved. The performance artist Timur, who plays the nameless man, wears a passport expression throughout much of the show, as if in a trance or daymare. McQuilken, the director, has said that he sought to “movie a score” instead of scoring a movie, and it works: the visual montages power the opera’s music, which wheels from berceuse to nu-metal fury to the hypnotic. Earplugs are provided.
When Raymond Chandler wrote, in The Big Sleep, that “the world was a wet emptiness,” he could have been describing the atmosphere of Dead as a Dodo, a dazzlingly inventive puppet show produced by the theater company Wakka Wakka. The eighty-minute show conjures an allegory from the depths of a shadowy void, where every sound seems to echo into an infinite abyss. The only sources of light are the glowing orbs of two pairs of eyes, belonging to a skeletal boy and a dodo. We follow this boy and his avian companion as they traverse a desolate realm in search of replacement bones for the boy, who is missing a leg and preemptively lamenting his own imminent “disappearance.” They encounter red spaghettilike scavengers, a hungry iridescent whale, a giant purple worm, and the Bone King, a cigar-chomping figure—half washed-up rock star, half mobster—who presides over the Bone Realm along with his eerie daughter. The production excels in its visual storytelling, blending intricate puppetry with the skillful use of light and shadow. One standout sequence immerses the audience in the River Styx: undulating sheets of plastic become waves, drawing viewers into an otherworldly underwater pursuit. It manages to be subtle and even, maybe, hopeful: as the boy and the dodo struggle to escape their nemeses, the bird begins sprouting feathers.
Rhoda Feng is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, The Nation, and The New York Times.
