We watched astonished as the Greeks burst in, pikes leveled, horns blaring, a song of victory on their lips. We said nothing as they mocked us in strange tongues and herded us into the great hall to witness scenes of horror. To see mothers and daughters carted away in separate cages. A princess dragged off […]
Category: Experimental
Appetite for Deconstruction or A Culinary Guide to ‘Pataphysics: Max and Kirill Review “Now Serving” and “The Infinite Wrench”
Two plays with culinary themes and a pataphysical bent. Two reviewers with appetites for deconstruction and a taste for Alfred Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions. In the theatrical equivalent of a pub crawl, Max and Kirill bicycled from Radiohole’s Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses at The Collapsible Hole to the […]
Why?
The product of over six decades of fruitful collaboration, Why? by legendary English director Peter Brook and French playwright Marie-Hélène Estienne is many things: a fanciful reimagining of the birth of theatre from the spirit of boredom, a playful comparison of the methods of Stanislavsky and his lesser-known but equally influential contemporary Vsevolod Meyerhold, a […]
Looking Through a Glass Onion: A Review of “This Is Why We Live”
A Nobel laureate, a cellist, two actors, three languages—it sounds like a list from one of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lyrical flights of irony. On the surface the recipe promises a reverential homage to a Great Writer, the kind of soufflé savored by schoolteachers and cultural attachés and roundly parodied by exiled Polish writer Witold […]
Two Critics, Three Opinions: A Review of “The Talmud”
A genre-bending show combining Kung Fu and the Talmud by a company called Meta-Phys Ed? Max and Kirill wanted in, even if it meant schlepping down to Sunset Park. Luckily, the post-industrial neighborhood boasts more than just bleeding-edge theater. Five Boroughs Brewing Co. a few blocks north set the stage for their post-show debate. Max: […]
“At Black Lake” Speaks, But What Is It Saying?
Metal foil lines a bare stage, a black mirror warping the bodies of two barefoot couples in mourning. Two chairs, two milk crates rearrange themselves endlessly in patterns of resentment, avoidance, aggression, indifference during brief, unpredictable blackouts, as dissonant music plays and bits of glow tape flit through the dark like fireflies on a summer […]