A Dozen Dreams (Play)

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    When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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    These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel.

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      Fuzzy puppet sheep. A light cutting through the haze. Hand-designed dreamscapes. There’s plenty to savor in the slow return of pixel-free theater.Striding across the plaza at Lincoln Center on a Saturday afternoon, past the bronze Henry Moore figure reclining in the reflecting pool, a man and a woman debated the sheep on the hill. Up ahead, off to their left, a small woolly flock had gathered.He was sure that they were actual animals, these five grown sheep and one darling lamb, each with its own shepherd in head-to-toe black. She argued the opposite, and was correct: These were life-size puppets, their shepherds puppeteers, and this was a pop-up performance. Under one of those broad-brimmed hats, maneuvering a long-lashed, tan-faced sheep named the Shredder, was the puppeteer Basil Twist.Yet with theater beginning its cautious tiptoe back from the sterility of the screen to the vitality (or so we hope) of in-person performance, these puppet sheep had a kind of realness that I’ve craved. As they gamboled about a fenced-off oasis of genuine grass that covers the sloping roof of a darkened upscale restaurant, their casual, nameless show was some of the truest theater I’d seen in many months.Because they were there, and so was I, and there wasn’t a pixel in sight.Theater, real theater, is an art form that we’re meant to show up for, meeting it in physical space with our physical selves. We take in the sights and scents and sounds as they happen; we note the feel of the air and the ground beneath our feet. Theater is a dialogue between artists and audience that’s also a ritual for the senses — which, after such a surfeit of digital drama, are primed to tingle.Admittedly, I had fallen in love with Twist’s charming creatures online, streaming his pandemic production of “Titon et l’Aurore,” which he had directed and designed for the Opéra Comique in Paris — a show so resplendent with puppet sheep that some were stacked into towers, and others floated through the sky.The Shredder and the rest of the gang at Lincoln Center — Splinter, Machete, Bertha, Fang and the baby, Mower — were modeled on their Parisian counterparts, with rattan skeletons and woolen coats made from wigs, whose white curls fluttered in the breeze.While a critic grew fond of the sheep puppets in an online performance, that was no match for getting close to them in person.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOn their patch of pasture, otherwise known as the Illumination Lawn (not to be confused with Mimi Lien’s nearby synthetic lawn installation, “The Green,” which is essentially set design as public art), they were like an apparition reflected in the vast glass front of Lincoln Center Theater.Toddlers were enchanted, determined to stroke Mower’s face, which the lamb’s playful puppeteer, Juanita Cardenas, warmly allowed. Spying the flock, passing dogs barked, jumped back or, if they were terribly brave, strained close to investigate.There was no plot to the performance, and barely any choreography, but it was chance-encounter magic nonetheless: puppets made by human hands and operated by artists exchanging energy — and even eye contact — with their audience.Which didn’t stop some adults who filtered through the plaza from wondering what was going on, and whether there was some deep meaning that eluded them.“Just a little herd of sheep on the hill, for the sweetness of it,” Twist said afterward, standing at one end of the reflecting pool with the Shredder in his arms.Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design proves to be an emotional highlight of “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTHE FIRST LIVE SHOW I saw when theater started returning this spring was “Blindness,” which is arguably neither live nor a show. The only actor’s voice is recorded — Juliet Stevenson, whisper-close through our headphones.But we, the audience, are live: distanced yet gathered nonetheless at the Daryl Roth Theater, off Union Square, to experience a work of art together. The thing that most moved me about it could never have happened on a screen.I’d wondered since the start of the shutdown how lighting designers would ever use haze again without freaking the audience out, since the nature of haze is to make the air visible, which makes us think about what we’re breathing, which in the past year-plus has been a very scary thing. I’d worried a little about whether it might freak me out.But there came a point in “Blindness” when the lighting designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun, broke the pitch-blackness with a soft and gorgeous beam of illumination angling through the air. As I gazed at it, I realized that the theater had been filling with haze while we were submerged in darkness, that through our masks we’d already been breathing it.And so I sat there, headphones clapped to my ears, and felt tears trickle down my cheeks — because it hadn’t unsettled me, because it felt safe and because, wow, had I missed great lighting design.IT’S SO EASY, gazing into a screen, to lose awareness of your own body. In-person theater doesn’t let that happen — and this early in the industry restart, that is double-edged.To go to a small show called “Persou” — directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos at the Cell, a performance space in Chelsea — I signed a lengthy Covid liability waiver “on behalf of myself and all of my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,” whoever those might be.Once there, I realized that even masked and fully vaccinated, in a well-ventilated room, I am not wild about the idea of standing close to strangers for a long stretch of time. Also, I will actively resist if you try to get me to dance as part of your show — though that was true even before the pandemic.I don’t regret going, though. A four-piece band played music from Cyprus and Greece that I could have listened to all night, and we spent a brief but lovely part of the performance in the incense-scented back garden, under the moon and a tall, spreading tree.And I’m pretty sure I will remember for a long time the stroller-pushing woman who walked by with her little boy as the audience waited outside, preshow, on West 23rd Street. Swearing, she muttered that we were taking up the whole sidewalk, which was a valid gripe. We are out of practice at sharing collective space.THERE ARE SENSATIONS you don’t realize you miss until you encounter them again. Like the paint-wood-adhesive smell of a freshly made set, which is part of what I loved about “A Dozen Dreams,” the En Garde Arts production at the downtown mall Brookfield Place. It’s a show that can feel, with its lack of actors, pleasingly like a walk-through of an installation.“You are the actor,” each audience member is told through headphones, at the start of a trek through 12 disparate sets belonging to 12 short plays by women, each of whom speaks her own text on the recording.Solo or in pairs, we find ourselves in Ellen McLaughlin’s “The First Line,” with its maquette scale and cracked theatricality; in Martyna Majok’s “Pandemic Dreams,” which is eerily and unambiguously a nightmare; in Rehana Lew Mirza’s “The Death of Dreams,” whose color-saturated intensity and interlocking pieces reminded me of the imagery in my own pandemic dreams.A couple of sets include video of the playwrights speaking their text, and I wish they didn’t. When I see an on-screen performance in an in-person show now, a part of me just shuts down — a reaction to online theater, but probably I have always been like this. In art museums, I look for the signature on a canvas, because to me that’s proof that a human was there. Similarly, I want my theater handmade.To a gratifying extent, “A Dozen Dreams” provides that. Irina Kruzhilina, who did the visual and environment design, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, who did the lighting, offer us something we haven’t had much of lately. We are bodily immersed in this show, and very, very far from the lonely, make-do experience of streaming theater.FIVE DAYS after I watched Twist and his band of puppeteers frolic with their sheep, I was sitting under the trees at Lincoln Center, looking out over the reflecting pool. It was early evening, and chilly shadows had crept over most of the plaza. But up at the top of the Illumination Lawn, a slice of sunlight beckoned, and I went toward it.As I stepped onto the grass, I noticed something curious on the stairs, where the flock had milled about to meet the public: a fuzzy white curl, caught on some blades of green.This remnant of puppet sheep — surely that’s what it was — filled me with disproportionate joy. Off I paced across the lawn, scanning the ground like Mare of Easttown searching for forensic evidence. The grass was scattered with it: tiny puffs of puppet wool, physical artifacts of a performance that had happened live, in 3-D, in front of an audience that was close enough to touch.Call me a traditionalist if you like, but no digital trail will ever compete with that. More

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      ‘A Dozen Dreams’ Review: Eerie Memories Bring Magic to the Mall

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      Twelve exquisitely designed installations capture the fears, hopes and reveries shared on audio by 12 women playwrights.A dark room with a naked bulb hanging over a headless, but dressed, seated mannequin. A nightmare room of shattered glass. A room of Tetris-ed cardboard boxes. A wishful room of sunrise or sunset, depending on your disposition.Part art installation, part immersive theater, En Garde Arts’s endlessly intriguing “A Dozen Dreams” takes audience members on a self-guided audio tour through the pandemic dreams of 12 female playwrights, rendered in a dozen rooms exquisitely designed to replicate the surreal, chameleonic chambers of the mind at rest.Created by Anne Hamburger, who conceived it along with John Clinton Eisner and Irina Kruzhilina, “A Dozen Dreams” begins in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, a high-end mall in downtown Manhattan and the most unlikely setting for such a wonderfully strange work. (The show is being presented by Arts Brookfield.)Audience members in singles or pairs are given an iPhone preprogrammed with the dream sketches, written and performed by the playwrights. (Each performance, taken in on headphones, is roughly 50 minutes long and free; reservations are staggered in 20 minute slots.)Initially “A Dozen Dreams” doesn’t look like much: Among the towering palm trees and the lifeless luxury is a small room, the inside of which is designed as a dilapidated theater.Ellen McLaughlin’s installation includes a model of a theater without an audience.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is Ellen McLaughlin’s dream, which is one that many viewers may relate to: She is pushed onto a stage but doesn’t have any clue as to what she’s performing.It’s a perfect beginning to this kind of somnambulist theater, where the subconscious is the star, trying to make sense of everyday anxieties and concerns while life has been irrevocably changed by a global pandemic.You don’t stay here long; at the end of McLaughlin’s dream you’re guided by the stage manager to some hidden part of Brookfield. A back hallway leads to a larger labyrinth of interconnected rooms where live the dreams of the other 11 playwrights, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok and the former artistic director of the McCarter Theater Center, Emily Mann, as well as the off-Broadway writers Andrea Thome, Mona Mansour, Ren Dara Santiago, Rehana Mirza, Caridad Svich, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Liza Jessie Peterson, Sam Chanse and Lucy Thurber.The vast differences among them creates a captivating patchwork of memories, reveries, and wishes — and it’s impossible to guess what fantastical world you’ll encounter next.Andrea Thome’s childhood home in Wisconsin is depicted in her piece, entitled “House Dreaming.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThome’s “House Dreaming” invites the audience into a fragmented version of her childhood home in Madison, Wis. Bookshelves reveal Hesse and Dickens and Woolf, while a teddy bear, a hardcover book and a blue ceramic mug sit on a windowsill of what looks like a child’s bedroom.From inside, the panes of glass reveal a snowy scene, wiry tree branches reaching in every direction. As Thome recalls the “hickory, oak, the tall, tall pine,” their stately trunks frame the space, some even hosting little dioramas of living rooms and bedrooms overgrown with flowers and trees.“Who are you when you lose home?” Thome asks near the end of her segment, one that represents “A Dozen Dreams” at its best: whimsical yet still grounded, reflective without being didactic. But as with any anthology, there are opposite extremes. Peterson and Thurber opt for a more political (and pedantic) angle, sharing their hopes for change in a divided nation after the Black Lives Matter protests, while Santiago and Dickerson-Despenza fly off into the abstract with stream-of-consciousness poetry.Most of the installations hit a sweet spot in the middle, with the audio performances mellowing the tone, as though each playwright were speaking to a friend. In “The Death of Dreams,” Mirza recounts her dream of moving lightly, with playful asides, while still having sobering moments of introspection. (“It’s almost like we know we can’t ask for much anymore, not even in our daydreams.”) In “Secret Catastrophe” Chanse speaks with a similar nonchalance, accented with moments of dry humor (“I’m trying to get to Providence — the city, not the concept.”).Other playwrights, however, lean so heavily into the dream theme that the performances feel affected. Svich’s dream of the ocean is glacial, a sleepy monotonous lull of language. Dickerson-Despenza, who recently won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, brings her signature lyricism to her segment, which is more percussion than text, an indecipherable tangle of metaphors and images.But even in the segments with the strongest writing, the words always play second fiddle to the inspired dream spaces, courtesy of the production’s outstanding designers, Rena Anakwe, Brittany Bland, Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and Kruzhilina.Multicolored lighting columns are a focal point in Sam Chanse’s “Secret Catastrophe.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith a mannequin, a staticky TV set and weblike curtains of black yarn, they bring an unnerving sense of horror to Majok’s dreamscape. And in Chanse’s dream the brilliantly lit geometric columns, which change from cool blues to springy pastels, recall some fantastical other-world, perhaps from “The Dark Crystal.”Throughout the production, it’s the details that delight: several clocks all set to the time 10:10; tiny portholes in a wall revealing a Lilliputian table with tiny bottles of alcohol, miniature doughnuts and other scaled-down domestic details; an illuminated fissure in the floor like a living fault line.In fact, there’s so much to see that “A Dozen Dreams” can overload the senses, making it likely you’ll miss something — an excuse to revisit it. And just as time follows its own logic in dreams, so too does this experience seem to move impossibly quickly.The rapid prattle of some of the playwrights, like Majok, is too hard to catch while you’re taking in the sights. And the muddle of narratives like Mansour’s — about a prom night and a performance and a family she once nannied for — doesn’t make things any easier to follow.The self-guided aspect also presents a challenge. Most of the rooms are separated by curtains, and a few arrows and some lighting help point the way, but the production could do with more signs and directions. I went twice because I fully enjoyed the experience, but also to catch what I had missed the first time, especially as I hesitantly wandered from room to room, unsure if I was going the right way.For such an imaginative production, “A Dozen Dreams” fizzles out near the end, with Mann’s final installation failing to leave a lasting impression. But being there led me back to my own recent reveries. After a spate of protests I dreamed that Black citizens — me and my family included — were herded and enslaved. I dreamed of my childhood home. I had a recurring dream of the apocalypse.In penetrating moments of loneliness during lockdown, I had nightmares of being lost in labyrinthine hallways and trapped in rooms by dangerous men.That the talented women behind “A Dozen Dreams” can capture just a sliver of those emotions is no small accomplishment. Last year I learned how a room can come to represent utter isolation. In this production I learned how a room can represent any time or place — the limitless reach of our imagination. As McLaughlin asks, “What dreams are we headed for tonight?”A Dozen DreamsThrough May 30 at Brookfield Place, Manhattan; engardearts.org More