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      A Broadway Theater Owner Rethinks Post-Pandemic Ticket Selling

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Broadway Theater Owner Rethinks Post-Pandemic Ticket SellingJujamcyn, which operates five of the 41 Broadway houses, said that when theater returns it will use SeatGeek instead of Ticketmaster.In a sign that some theaters are rethinking how they will operate when Broadway reopens, Jujamcyn Theaters is overhauling its ticketing practices.Credit…David S. Allee for The New York TimesMichael Paulson and Jan. 29, 2021As many live performance venues rethink their operations in anticipation of a post-pandemic reopening, one of Broadway’s major theater owners has decided to overhaul its ticketing practices.Jujamcyn Theaters, home to the musicals “Hadestown,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “The Book of Mormon,” said Friday that it had reached an agreement with SeatGeek, a disruptive newcomer to the marketplace, to handle of all its ticketing. It had been using Ticketmaster, the dominant platform for concerts and other live events.The agreement is SeatGeek’s first on Broadway; the company, which is based in New York, works primarily in the sports industry in the United States, but also has theater clients in London’s West End.“We’re always scanning the landscape for what is new and what is possible, but the shutdown really changed what we were looking for,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn, which operates five of the 41 Broadway theaters. “There are capabilities that SeatGeek has built that speak directly to the now, and also, I think, to the future.”Roth would not describe the financial details of the arrangement, but said he had been impressed by the company’s technological flexibility, as well as its use of historical and comparative pricing to help customers assess ticket value. He said that beyond selling tickets, its technology could be used to allow customers to order food and drink, arrange transportation, purchase merchandise and get other information. SeatGeek will also allow tickets for Jujamcyn shows to be resold through its platform.The deal is a coup for SeatGeek, which began in 2009 as an aggregator of listings on the secondary ticketing market but has become a significant competitor to Ticketmaster in selling tickets directly on behalf of theaters and sports teams. SeatGeek sells tickets for the Dallas Cowboys, the Cleveland Cavaliers and a number of Major League Soccer teams.Danielle du Toit, the president of SeatGeek Enterprise, the company’s primary sales platform, said the Jujamcyn deal would showcase innovations like allowing patrons to order a glass of Champagne to be delivered to their seat at intermission.“For the average Joe,” du Toit said, “the idea is that it’s easy, it’s intuitive, it’s fast, it’s enjoyable.”The shutdown of live events during the pandemic has dealt a blow to all venues and ticketing companies. But behind the scenes, it has also sped up some changes that had been bubbling through the business for years, like contactless concessions sales and the transition to mobile, paperless ticketing. Roth said Jujamcyn had not yet determined whether paper tickets would still be used post-pandemic.Some venues and sports teams have also used the pause to rethink their ticketing alliances; in November, for example, two Houston soccer teams, the Dynamo FC and its affiliated women’s club, the Dash, signed with SeatGeek.When events return, many venues and ticket sellers say they expect extensive safety protocols that may even be embedded into the ticketing process. Late last year, Ticketmaster said it was considering implementing plans like confirming a patron’s vaccination status through a third-party smartphone app. A Ticketmaster spokeswoman said this week that the company was still awaiting federal and state guidance about reopening; Ticketmaster said on Friday it had no comment about losing Jujamcyn as a client.Du Toit said that the slowdown of events gave SeatGeek the opportunity to develop the kinds of features that are part of its Jujamcyn deal.“We’ve used this downtime to dig deeper into our technology,” she said.“The Book of Mormon,” “Hadestown” and “Moulin Rouge!” were all selling strongly before the pandemic and plan to return once theaters can reopen. Two other musicals housed in Jujamcyn theaters, “Frozen” and “Mean Girls,” have announced that they will not resume performances post-pandemic, so the company has two vacant houses to fill.SeatGeek becomes the third major ticketing services provider on Broadway; many theaters use Telecharge, which is owned by Broadway’s biggest landlord, the Shubert Organization; Jujamcyn had used Telecharge until switching to Ticketmaster in 2016. Ticketmaster continues to work with the Nederlander Organization, another major Broadway landlord. Of course, many consumers purchase tickets not through the primary ticket sellers, which handle direct sales online and at the box office, but also through brokers, resellers, or intermediaries like TKTS and TodayTix.The average Broadway ticket cost $121 last season. It remains unclear whether prices will change when Broadway reopens, although many producers expect less premium pricing (those are the highest-priced tickets for the hottest shows; for example, before the pandemic “Hamilton” was regularly selling many of its seats at premium prices of $847 each), at least in the short-term, as the industry seeks to rebuild.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tonys Voting is Coming Soon. The Awards? We Still Don’t Know.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTonys Voting is Coming Soon. The Awards? We Still Don’t Know.Organizers of the ceremony have firmed up dates for selecting favorites, but won’t commit to an event until plans for Broadway’s return are set.Elizabeth Stanley, center, in the musical “Jagged Little Pill,” which was nominated for 15 Tony Awards, the most of any show in the abbreviated 2019-20 season.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJan. 29, 2021The question has preoccupied Broadway lovers for months: When are the Tony Awards?On Friday, the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, the two organizations that oversee the awards, took a step toward clarifying their latest thinking.They said two things: One, the much-delayed awards will be scheduled “in coordination with the reopening of Broadway.” And two, the voting will take place from March 1 to March 15.What does that mean? It means, first, that the process is moving forward. The 784 (give or take a few) voters will be soon able to cast ballots for the best work of the season that began in April 2019 and ended, prematurely, in February 2020. (Theaters were open until mid-March, but Tony administrators decided only shows that opened by Feb. 19 would be eligible for awards because too few voters had seen those that opened later.)The voters will be choosing among a group of nominees announced last October. The best musical nominees are “Jagged Little Pill,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” and “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical,” and the best play nominees are “Grand Horizons,” “The Inheritance,” “Sea Wall/A Life,” “Slave Play” and “The Sound Inside.”It also makes official what has become increasingly apparent: the ceremony will look forward, toward the 2021-22 season, as much as it looks backward, to the 2019-20 season. The coronavirus pandemic has scuttled a 2020-21 season.The ceremony, which is typically aired on network television, looks likely to promote the return of Broadway, and the presenters are not committing to a date because they don’t know when reopening will happen. Many producers are currently hoping for September, in which case a ceremony could take place in June, but throughout the pandemic many such predictions have come and gone.The Tonys were originally scheduled to take place last June.As was true the last time voting took place, in the spring of 2019, all voting will be electronic, and the voters, who are mostly producers, presenters, and people who work in the theater industry, can only vote in categories in which they have seen all the nominees. A subset of voters are allowed to vote in the categories of best orchestrations and best sound design, because those categories have been deemed too specialized for the full pool of voters to decide.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: Playwriting and Bug-Hunting Wed in ‘The Catastrophist’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: Playwriting and Bug-Hunting Wed in ‘The Catastrophist’Pandemics and ordinary tragedies clash in Lauren Gunderson’s overwrought portrait of her husband, the virologist Nathan A. Wolfe.William DeMeritt as the pandemic expert Nathan A. Wolfe in “The Catastrophist.”Credit…via Marin and Round House TheatersJan. 28, 2021Theater is not just not science, says the title character in “The Catastrophist”: It’s fraud. “Very nice, well-lit fraud.”That’s a harsh judgment, especially coming from Lauren Gunderson, America’s most-produced living dramatist. It’s also an acrobatic flip of perspective that, like her new play, deserves high points for difficulty if not execution.I say that only partly because the title character of “The Catastrophist” is Gunderson’s husband, Nathan A. Wolfe. Wolfe is a renowned virologist who has played a major role in shaping our understanding of zoonotic infection: the process by which viruses — like Ebola and the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — jump from animals to humans.So to recap, we have a playwright creating a stage version of her husband, who undermines her work with words she’s given him. That’s some heavy form-and-function sleight of hand, but perhaps Gunderson sees theater as a parasite — a useful one — injecting its genetic material into foreign hosts, much the way viruses do.Certainly “The Catastrophist,” available to stream through Feb. 28, is as likely as the rest of Gunderson’s plays, many about science, to go viral. She has a knack for writing to the needs of actual theaters — in this case, Marin Theater Company in Mill Valley, Calif., and Round House Theater in Washington. Previous works including “I and You,” “Natural Shocks” and “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” have strong hooks, minimal production requirements and few, if juicy, roles.The solo show is expertly shot inside an empty theater.Credit…via Marin and Round House TheaterThat’s the case here as well. Wolfe (William DeMeritt) is the only character, the set is bare, and the premise is timely. Too timely, perhaps. Begun last April but set in 2016, “The Catastrophist” uses the coronavirus as an invisible antagonist and shadow mascot, which means imbuing Wolfe with a kind of heroic prescience. I’d call it self-serving except that in a play that isn’t autobiography the question of “self” has been fudged.In any case, the baleful tone of the 80-minute monologue — beautifully filmed with three cameras in front of an empty audience at the Marin company’s Boyer Theater — gives “The Catastrophist” the feeling of a staged lecture, as if Cassandra got a TED Talk. But Wolfe’s own TED talks are much less self-burnishing; he seems like your cool 10th grade science teacher. As written by Gunderson, though, he comes off as a science snob with a serious case of I-told-you-so smugness.That’s especially true in the first half. After a scene that announces the play’s coyly unstable narrative — “Was there a prologue I should be aware of?” Wolfe asks — we are introduced to the science of virology and Wolfe’s history as a bug hunter. His years of research in Cameroon, risking something horrifically called simian foamy virus, are duly honored and unduly exoticized. Later, despite suffering from what Gunderson presents as an equally horrific affliction — kidney stones — he staggers to lunch to warn the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of “this new Ebola outbreak in West Africa.”“I could tell it was going to bad,” he says, as if he were the only one. “And it was.”This part of the play is essentially a promotional résumé, poetically phrased and embroidered with metatheatrical doodads. From time to time, Wolfe is interrupted by creepy music, loud heartbeats and a voice in his head that we cannot hear. (The sound design, full of clichés, is by Chris Houston.) It gradually becomes clear that the voice is Gunderson’s, chattily keeping Wolfe and, through him, the audience abreast of her compositional tactics. At one point he tells us that his wife has changed the play’s title, formerly “The Virologist,” to “The Catastrophist.”It’s lovely that Gunderson loves her husband so much that she agreed to write about him despite initial misgivings, and that she apparently could not keep her distance from him even for 80 minutes. DeMeritt helps you understand why: His take on Wolfe is smart and sexy enough to make the character’s snark compelling and his enthusiasm for science contagious. Jasson Minadakis’s staging and the camerawork by Peter Ruocco do well by the story, too, getting a lot of visual variety out of a rather stiff setup; terrific lighting by Wen-Ling Liao helps.But by the time the play, in its second half, takes a turn toward the purely personal, focusing on Wolfe’s own disappointments and milestones rather than biology’s, the thread of the storytelling has completely frayed.Except for an unseemly moment in which Wolfe is permitted to fulminate against unspecified critics who accused him of botching the American response to Ebola, virology now disappears. Instead, Gunderson has Wolfe dive into the death of a parent, the birth of a child and his own medical scare as if these universal human events, however sad or happy, were tragedies and blessings on the order of pandemics and vaccines.This undermines the whole play: When the ordinary stuff of life is forced to serve as drama, the truly dramatic stuff comes to seem ordinary.What’s left from the self-canceling content is the form, and if you’ve ever seen one of Gunderson’s plays, with their switcheroo dramaturgy, you won’t be surprised by the surprise near the end of this one. It’s not very original, but it does allow Gunderson to assert her dominance in what is, after all, her own field. Theater may still be a fraud but, by hook or by crook, it’s going to be her fraud.The CatastrophistThrough Feb. 28; marintheatre.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Great Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop Screen

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewGreat Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop ScreenThe Lessingtage theater festival, held online this year because of the pandemic, shows some of Europe’s finest performers, in classic plays by Brecht, Schiller, Ibsen and others.In “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October, eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set.Credit…Arno DeclairJan. 28, 2021MUNICH — When it comes to recorded theater, great acting translates to video much better than elaborate productions with complex concepts or intricate sets. So when the Thalia Theater, in Hamburg, Germany, asked 10 European playhouses to send their best shows for an online edition of the Lessingtage, an international festival held every January, by and large the theaters privileged accomplished performances over virtuosic stagecraft.The result, “Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from Europe,” is a wide-ranging survey of contemporary European theater that casts a spotlight on some of the continent’s finest stage actors. At a time when few people are allowed to travel — and even fewer theaters to open — the chance to discover new and recent stage works from the Iberian Peninsula to Russia feels particularly vital.While a few of the “Lessingtage Digital” productions debuted during the pandemic, the majority of the work on offer is already several seasons old, giving online viewers the opportunity to discover productions whose live runs may have already ended.One of the newest, and best, of the bunch is Anne Lenk’s stylish and focused staging of “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October. Throughout the evening, the eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set. Yet there is nothing stilted or fussily formal about Lenk’s interpretation of Schiller’s historical tragedy.The cast, clad in Sibylle Wallum’s flamboyant costumes, is uniformly superb, alive to the emotional and political turmoil of the drama, and how they intersect. This holds particularly true for the production’s incandescent stars, Franziska Machens as Mary, fighting from her prison cell to stay alive, and Julia Windischbauer as her proud yet conflicted rival, Elizabeth.The two queens come face-to-face only once, in a climactic 10-minute showdown in which Mary, refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth’s superior rank, blows her one chance at salvation to savor a moment of triumph. In a production where great acting tumbled forth in an endless stream, this confrontation stood out for its raw, electric charge.Lenk’s flat aesthetic is also kind to the high-definition cameras, which capture the seething performances with unobtrusive directness.“Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias” combines performers from the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Danel Quartet, a French musical ensemble.Credit…Kurt van der ElstI was also impressed with how well another production, “Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias,” translated to the screen. This absorbing diptych of mythically inspired dramatic monologues for actresses — one old, one young — premiered around the same time as “Mary Stuart.” Directed by Guy Cassiers, the artistic director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, the two parts of the evening are unified by the French musical ensemble the Danel Quartet performing Shostakovich string quartets via video feed.In “Antigone,” the author Stefan Hertmans transposes Sophocles’ tragedy to contemporary Belgium, where a law student, Nouria (Ikram Aoulad), embarks on a futile quest to retrieve the mortal remains of her brother, an ISIS fighter, from a forensics lab. Addressing the audience, Aoulad conveys her character’s pain and resolute sense of justice with both elegance and quaking rage.In “Tiresias,” the actress Katelijne Damen recites a blistering, dizzying poem by the young British poet Kae Tempest, a subversive retelling of the myth of the blind, gender-fluid prophet. Damen’s rendition of the virtuosic text is shot through with grace and wit. Especially impressive was how the Toneelhuis’ wide-screen camerawork (shot by Charlotte Bouckaert, who is also responsible for the set) succeeded in capturing the power of chamber theater.Stefanie Reinsperger, left, in the Berliner Ensemble’s production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”Credit…Matthias HornThere was a similar intimacy to the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The theatrical miracle of Michael Thalheimer’s fine-grained staging can be boiled down to two words: Stefanie Reinsperger.The young Austrian actress has been a member of the theater’s acting ensemble since 2017, and Grusha Vashnadze, the fierce survival artist at the center of Brecht’s late drama, was one of the first roles she stepped into at the house. As the peasant girl protecting an abandoned infant amid the horrors of war, Reinsperger pleads, howls and fights for herself with an intensity and pathos that is almost hard to bear. I was almost glad to have that raw experience mediated for me by a screen: Live in the theater, up close and personal, I don’t know if I’d have been able to take it.Eszter Onodi, left, in the Katona Jozsef Theatre’s produciton of “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers.”Credit…Horvath JuditOn the other hand, Eszter Onodi’s mesmerizing performance in “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers,” an update of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” made me feel as though I were sitting in the audience of Budapest’s Jozsef Katona Theater, rather than watching alone from my living room. In her deceptively simple performance, Onodi strips away the character’s artifice to reveal unsuspected depths. The production’s young director Kriszta Szekely brings the protofeminist heroine crashing into the present day in a faithful reworking that hammers home the contemporary relevance of Nora’s plight, 150 years after the play’s scandalous premiere.In ensemble productions from Italy and Sweden, single virtuosic performances were less important than the symbiotic energy generated from large casts that brought their plays to life collectively.The most nail-bitingly exciting production of the festival was “Right You Are (If You Think So),” Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 farce, staged by Filippo Dini at the Teatro Stabile in Turin, about a group of villagers trying to learn the truth about a mysterious new neighbor.In Dini’s staging, the townspeople lounge around a grand, if decaying, apartment with moldings on the high ceilings and sheets covering the furniture. The 12-person cast forms a tight and dynamic unit and they get the tone and comic timing just right.Mattias Andersson’s production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm.Credit…Roger StenbergMattias Andersson’s starkly contemporary production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm, one of the festival’s co-producers, boasts an even larger cast than the Pirandello staging. This one of two stage versions of Dostoevsky’s novel at the festival: The other is a largely wordless expressionist pantomime for four physical actors from the Theater of Nations in Moscow, is the event’s wild card.The epic Swedish show is anchored by David Dencik’s fragile and fearless performance as Prince Myshkin, who finds himself hounded by the denizens of Russian society, high and low, after his release from a Swiss sanitarium.Even though the props look like they’re from Ikea and the large cast sits idly onstage for much of the evening, this production manages to paint a vast societal canvas populated with damaged and emotionally fraught characters who speak to us across centuries and languages.When the festival lineup was announced, I was struck at how many works by canonical authors had been selected — far more than is common at European theater festivals these days. After soaking up the Lessingtage’s 10 productions, I wondered why this should have come as any surprise.Schiller, Ibsen, Brecht and Pirandello created some of the stage’s richest and most complex characters. What greater pleasure could there possibly be than watching some of Europe’s finest stage actors breathe fresh life into them — even from the remove of our computer screens?Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from EuropeStreaming online through Jan. 31; thalia-theater.de.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Little Island Announces Resident Artists

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      @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More

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      Review: Road-Tripping with Frankenstein’s Monster in ‘Maery S.’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: Road-Tripping with Frankenstein’s Monster in ‘Maery S.’Sibyl Kempson’s unruly audio play takes Mary Shelley and her famed creation from old England to contemporary America. Bigfoot shows up, too.Dee Dorcas Beasnael provides the voice of Mary Shelley, among other characters, in the audio play “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.”Credit…via Abrons Arts CenterJan. 26, 2021In a monster throwdown, I’ll always rep Count Dracula over Frankenstein’s creature. But that’s not to say I don’t give Mary Shelley props for her creation; she turned a horror story into a philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence, the monkey’s paw of scientific discovery and the consequences of playing God. Her monster may not have fangs, but he’s more frightful for the ways he mirrors the dark nature of humanity.In Sibyl Kempson’s “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,” an experimental, four-part radio play presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf. Co., the woman often called the mother of horror and science fiction is resurrected and transmuted in a rambling epic that is conceptually unique but too often wearyingly opaque.“Maery S.,” which was commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory Theater, begins with a scholarly presentation: a rummaging through Shelley’s keepsakes — yes, “securely conferred” and “vouchsafed” — and a discussion of various definitions of “gothic” in literature, architecture, music.Then, via diary entries, we hear from Shelley (Dee Dorcas Beasnael, who also voices Shelley’s half sister Fanny and stepsister Clarie) — a freewheeling young woman ready to embark on a vagrant life of camping, travel and reprehensible gallivanting with a young married poet named Percy.That part is true, but “Maery S.” unravels its own fictions, strung through with anachronisms and modern language. Faster than you can say “Frankenstein,” the play transports Shelley to other places and times, including America between the 1970s and 2000s, where she road-trips in a pickup truck with the monster she dreamed up in her 1818 novel.That’s not all: Her Bill-and-Ted-esque excellent adventure is interspersed with accounts of sightings of Bigfoot and Sasquatch, voiced by Victor Morales and Crystal Wei with the fearful solemnity of a campfire story.“I’m juggling a lot right now, OK? Everything’s mixed up,” Shelley concedes at one point. Well said.A collage of images that inspired Kempson’s purposefully anachronistic production.Credit…Sibyl KempsonKempson, who wrote and directed, is no stranger to wildly postmodern, genre-defying work, and here her Shelley is prismatic, existing, as she says, in the “space between known and unknown.”So she recalls how Natasha Richardson played her in a 1986 psychological thriller, and speaks as a historical figure, a contemporary scholar and a sexually liberated witch-goddess (Hecate, Iris, Medusa and others are named).Kempson’s feminist politics are provocative, as is the way the play’s structure enacts a central theme of “Frankenstein” itself. Dr. Frankenstein created the monster, Shelley created Frankenstein, and Kempson re-creates Shelley out of a mishmash of details, some real, but many fictional.Traveling with the monster (a world-weary Brian Mendes), this Shelley proclaims how she “makes and unmakes” the world. Such moments of feminist self-actualization are riveting; for me they recall the slippery identities of the women in the work of Adrienne Kennedy and the bold declarations of the female characters in Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Wives.”But all of the juggling is tiring; nearly four hours long, “Maery S.” gets to feel like a chore (Beasnael’s self-conscious voice performance is no help). Kempson’s idiosyncratic shifts in setting and tone (and even accents; the male Romantic writers get especially dandified affects) help keep things lively, but only when they don’t function as belabored diversions.Case in point: the songs by Graham Reynolds, which range from sleepy folk-rock to campy pop, go on for too long. However, Chris Giarmo’s sound design, especially in the first two parts, beautifully complements the gothic themes: a feverish cascade of notes on a piano, and the feral groaning and blubbering of an unnatural creature among the chirping crickets on a dark night.Shelley wrote a monster of a novel, and Kempson has followed with a monster of a play, large and lumbering. It’s an ambitious act, but in the electric moment of a project coming to life, something sputters and flounders, perhaps even coming apart at the seams. Just ask Dr. Frankenstein — and the woman who birthed him.The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.Through May 15; abronsartscenter.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      When Theatermakers Long for the Stage, Playfully

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhen Theatermakers Long for the Stage, PlayfullyTwo short films that find pandemic-sidelined performers grappling with Beckett are a highlight of the annual Exponential Festival.Lucy Kaminsky in “The Puzzlers 2: Black Box.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalJan. 25, 2021“These films were made by theater people.”It’s just one line of text on the Exponential Festival website, explaining the provenance of a pair of video shorts in the lineup: zestfully odd and playful mash-ups of the first piece in Samuel Beckett’s doom-laden prose collection “Texts for Nothing,” from a company called Accent Wall Productions.Yet that simple declarative statement gets to the crux of the matter, which is that the experimental artists behind “The Puzzlers” and “The Puzzlers 2: Black Box” — notably including Jess Barbagallo and Emily Davis — know who they are, which shut-down art form they miss with a piercing longing and which different kind of work they’re making in the meantime.And they’re channeling into it a heightened, deadpan loopiness that elicits belly laughs.These two are the best of the handful of shows I watched at this year’s free, online festival.In “The Puzzlers,” an actor named Jay (Barbagallo, who shares the writing credit for both scripts with Beckett) is at home in Brooklyn with his acting coach (Lucy Kaminsky) and his dog (Bluet), struggling to memorize a section of “Texts for Nothing.” His grown daughter (Davis) interrupts, scandalized that he spent $7.49 on a little tub of almond pesto.“I’m an artist. I’m not a professional grocery shopper,” Jay says, attacked. “I’m just a guy, trying to learn a monologue, because it’s been a really long time since he applied himself to anything.”However unobtrusively, this is clearly a pandemic piece. On the festival website, Accent Wall Productions describes itself as “a survival-based art collective formed between four friends and a dog in March 2020.” The fourth human member of the group, André Callot, is credited as the editor of “The Puzzlers 2,” in which he also delivers a wonderfully atmospheric voice-over monologue. (“How long have I been here, what a question, I’ve often wondered.” And so on.)Joey Truman, left, and Tina Satter as characters who appear on Davis’s laptop in “The Puzzlers.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalThe second short is at least as friendly as the first but far more aching. Told in flashback, it achieves something I had not seen in all the deluge of video that has come in these past 10 months. Largely through black-and-white rehearsal stills of Barbagallo, Davis and Kaminsky, shot at The Brick in Brooklyn, it captures what theater feels like — the everyday incantation of it, and how unreachably far away that seems now.These two “Puzzlers” pieces are the start of a projected series that will adapt all of “Texts for Nothing.” Yes, please. We need some more.Elsewhere at the festival, the Fringe and Fur show “Madge Love” is billed as “an interactive theater-film hybrid.”The thing about theater, though, is that once you take away the live acting and live audience, shoot the performance on video with tight frames and fast intercuts, then layer in voice-overs and a score, what you have is a film, not a hybrid.Written and directed by Genee Coreno, with cinematography, animation and video editing by Dena Kopolovich, “Madge Love” is the story of Sissy (Arden Winant) and Madge (Lilja Owsley), teenagers with the kind of romantic streak that makes them love speaking bad French together.Lilja Owsley as the teenage title character in “Madge Love.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalThey also have a fondness for the very creepy Catherine Deneuve movie “Belle de Jour.” Their moody passion for each other is all mixed up in what they’ve already learned about the connection between sex, violence and female suffering at the hands of men.This is a good-looking production, beautifully lit by Marika Kent. The low-fi set (by Kent and Emily Greco) is the production’s most obvious remnant of theater: a metal truss standing in for a tree, a rippling blue tarp for water. We see painted cinder block walls, and the actors’ body mics. (The sound design and composition are by Coco Walsh.)One disappointment: The interactivity turns out to be minimal.“Animal Empire,” a digital mini-musical written, directed and produced by Yeujia Low, gestures not at all toward the stage. The story of an uprising against humans fomented by creatures of the farm and forest, it’s both strident and twee, and it makes the tactical error of opening on an off-putting note, with a character (represented, like most of the others, by an emoji head) doing bad vocal exercises.It does, however, have very amusing singing cameos by a snail (Low) and a sloth (Jason Pu), who can be counted on to be late for everything. There is also a winningly intimidating boar (Patrick Sweeney).A look at the script suggests that this version of “Animal Empire” is one draft of a more ambitious work in progress. For now, the best part is the rebellion itself, vividly animated like a music video, with animals fighting back everywhere.It’s a little weird right now to delight at insurrection, but this one involves fish and geese and deer. And, hey, they are unarmed.The Puzzlers + The Puzzlers 2: Black BoxStreaming at theexponentialfestival.org/thepuzzlersreturntentatively.Madge LoveStreaming at video.eko.com/v/Ap6aRL.Animal EmpireThrough Feb. 28; theexponentialfestival.org/animalempire.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More