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    At UTR and Exponential, Four Soul-Enriching Experiments in Theater

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    Buckle up for “Open Mic Night” and “Search Party” at Under the Radar and two wildly adventurous works at the Exponential Festival.Critic’s Pick‘Open Mic Night’Through Jan. 18 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 50 minutes.For about two-thirds of Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s new show, “Open Mic Night,” Weiss alternated between reminiscing about a now-closed space and asking audience members a series of rapid-fire questions, like “Vipers or moles?” “Vacation or voting?” Mounsey was sitting behind a laptop, which she used to drop sound cues, and the blinding house lights remained on as Weiss engaged in crowd work.Suddenly, Weiss said: “I’m tired of playing this character. Hi, I’m the real Peter now.” But then the house lights went down and a spotlight went up, and he was holding a mic, looking like a stand-up comedian in full performance mode. What was real? What was pretend? The duo seemed to be slyly reminding us that maybe a stage is not a place where we should expect authenticity. Plus, what does that even mean?Since their 2019 show “[50/50] old school animation,” Mounsey and Weiss have emerged as perhaps the most bracing theatermakers in New York City, a reputation confirmed in 2021 with “While You Were Partying” at Soho Rep. “Open Mic Night,” which runs through Jan. 18 and is being presented by Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York as part of this year’s Under the Radar festival, confirms that they are not so much about cringe as they are about questioning the relationship between artist and audience. (Nathan Fielder fans should take note.) During the round of questions, Weiss asked a woman, “Do you trust me?” After she said yes, he flatly said: “Interesting.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLICritic’s Pick‘Search Party’Through Jan. 13 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 1 hour.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      At the Exponential Festival, Case Studies in Category Busting

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      Two years into the pandemic, this festival, which has gone virtual for now, abjures traditional theatricality and performance.You know a show was hatched during the pandemic when it incorporates QR codes.At the start of Christina Tang’s streaming “Traffic,” part of this year’s Exponential Festival, that code took me from a YouTube page to one where I could pick a screen name and a number. A model of a car with my number was then placed among others on a board-game-like grid filmed from above. Participants could choose from a series of prompts (“pull forward,” “honk,” etc.) and disembodied hands would move the cars, or not, on the grid.At the same time, a series of messages in another window was going on and on about someone named Angela, who was dead, or not — or maybe a ghost. Since I was simultaneously trying to watch the cars and follow the comments in the chat box, I quickly lost track of the Angela side of things. (It’s best to experience “Traffic” with two screens; I spent the 45-minute running time toggling between my laptop and phone.)The overall effect was like a puckish re-enactment (with a soupçon of Battleship visuals) of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” in which a monstrous, paralyzing traffic jam devolves into violent chaos. Except that 55 years after its release, Godard’s movie remains more trenchant, formally and politically, than “Traffic” — though it ends on a suggestion of existential dread — or any of the other six shows I caught at Exponential.Unlike its higher-profile January siblings, the Under the Radar and Prototype festivals, which canceled their 2022 editions, the smaller, nimbler Exponential — which focuses on emerging experimental artists — managed to go ahead by pivoting to a free digital format. (It runs until Monday, and most of the programming will remain available on its YouTube channel for the foreseeable future.)“Traffic” was not the only project to borrow from gaming. In “Still Goes (The Game),” much of the screen is taken up by the explorations of two dogs, Spot and Lysol, who become humanoids and set off to wander in a digital world. The creators, Nola Latty and Thomas Wagner, play the game in a smaller window and comment on the proceedings. “Still Goes” evades deeper issues relating to the differences between species and unfurls like a lo-fi sandbox adventure.But it did leave me with questions: How is this theater, or even performance? Why do I feel like I could be watching Ryan Trecartin videos instead?From left, Arjun Dhawan, Nancy Nogood and Anna Dresdale in “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report.”Walter WlodarczykI mention Trecartin because throughout Exponential, I felt as if theater was trying to play catch-up with the art world. The performing arts have been undergoing an identity crisis during the last two years, and my lack of engagement with much of what I was watching this past week might have been because I had mismanaged my expectations.Even after two years of pandemic-related disruptions have forced us to start rethinking paradigms and reconsidering assumptions, it’s still hard to shake habits that were formed when a few Greeks started hanging out in amphitheaters. I had been expecting what Exponential participants might consider calcified (to them) ideas of performances, but the festival appears unconcerned with antiquated borders separating installations, video, live performance, theater, music, movement. Or at least this virtual edition accelerated Exponential’s evolution toward not caring about those borders.Fine, but if only there had been more wit, style, imagination.While one of the festival’s most anticipated selections, Leonie Bell with Local Grandma’s “We Live to Die: The Grieving Widows Club” does not open until Monday, the pieces I caught mostly fell short of their proclaimed ambitions. Many show descriptions nowadays, especially on the outer limits where Exponential dwells, tend to read like grant applications promising the excavation of Big Subjects. The reality usually turns out to be merely ho-hum — call it the “all bark and no bite” syndrome.We were informed, for example, that Joe Hendel’s “Artificial (Man) Intelligence” is about “a menagerie of cyborg males living in the uncanny valley, exposing their cut up, hybrid psychologies to the world in order to gain a sense of control over their cybernetically deterritorialized destinies.” What we got was a shapeless digital montage of anxieties, with many lines pulled from subreddits like r/MensRights and r/CircumcisionGrief. The original posters’ toxic brew of insecurity, resentment and hostility was confounding, but it’s unclear what the show was trying to tell us about it.Self-indulgence also hampered Braulio Cruz and John-Philip Faienza’s “Flow My Tears,” in which Cruz mused out loud for nearly an hour. Relief occasionally came in the form of electronic-music breaks. The more beat-oriented ones successfully evoked the pulsing atmosphere of a dank Berlin club — the kind of experience in which you can lose yourself, until a guy sidles up next to you to share his important thoughts. “Flow My Tears” went on to display some doom-scrolling and concluded by breezily taking Philip K. Dick’s name in vain.Justin Halle’s “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report,” directed by Dmitri Barcomi, took a more playful approach under the glamorous guidance of the drag queen Nancy Nogood — the closest the festival came to an old-school theatrical creation. Like “Traffic,” “Case Studies” incorporates a QR code, but no technology could make up for a rambling script that lacked rigor (a problem that plagued almost every project). Still, it’s hard to be entirely let down by a show that features a dance to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Emotion.”In addition to “Traffic,” another work got close to fulfilling its ambition: River Donaghey’s inventive “RecursiveCast,” in which Tad and Tammy (Spencer Fox and the Exponential artistic director Theresa Buchheister) host a podcast dedicated to a science-fiction series titled “Recursive.” The show is structured like a series of podcast episodes, with the visuals duplicating a Spotify page. Donaghey nails the sci-fi lingo, with casual references to a dodecasphere, for instance, adopting as fans’ tendency to assign great importance to details.“RecursiveCast” shares with “Traffic” a structural descent into uncontrollable disarray, with the world falling apart despite our best attempts at finding some sort of order, whether by trying to escape from a commuting disaster or by scrutinizing triviality. If there’s a lesson to be drawn, it’s that technology may have allowed the Exponential Festival to happen against daunting odds, but hey, we’re all doomed! 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

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      Theater to Stream: Festivals, Festivals, Festivals

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Festivals, Festivals, FestivalsThe Under the Radar, Prototype and Exponential festivals are ready to open our minds with experimental work, even if their doors are shut.Alexi Murdoch in “Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists,” part of the Prototype Festival.Credit…Pierre-Alain GiraudJan. 6, 2021Updated 12:41 p.m. ETSet dates for previews, openings and closings. Fall and spring seasons. Heck: turning up somewhere on time!Until the pandemic occurred in 2020, many of us perhaps did not realize how much theater relies on appointments. Now that most of them have vanished, with theater — and time itself — becoming somewhat amorphous, it’s comforting to see that the January festivals are still happening.Once cursed as the sluggish period of the year that follows the holiday rush, January has slowly turned into a hyperactive showcase for experimental work. And so it remains this year. While the doors remain physically shut, our minds can still open up.Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall, the creators of “Capsule,” part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Credit…Melissa Bunni ElianUnder the RadarIn a way, going online was a natural step for Under the Radar (through Jan. 17). Hosted by the Public Theater, the 17-year-old event has always questioned the very nature of the art form: “What makes something theater?” the festival director Mark Russell pondered in a recent video chat. “Can an exhibit be a theater piece? Does a story have to be a part of it? This is a lot of hubris, but I felt like the whole world turned into UTR,” he added, laughing.One thing that has not changed is Under the Radar’s international bent — this year with a mix of on-demand and appointment shows, all of them free. Among the on-demand offerings are works in which two wildly creative women take on roles different from the ones they’re known for: “Capsule,” in which the rising director Whitney White (“What to Send Up When It Goes Down”) steps on the virtual stage; and “Espíritu,” which was written and directed by the prominent Chilean actress Trinidad González (“A Fantastic Woman”).As for the livestreams, mark your calendar for Piehole’s “Disclaimer”; “Borders & Crossings,” by the Nigerian-British playwright and performer Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”); and “A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call,” by 600 Highwaymen.Shara Nova, left, and Helga Davis in “Ocean Body,” which is part of the Prototype Festival.Credit…Mark DeChiazzaPrototypeThe experimental operas and musical-theater pieces that the Prototype festival presents can take three to five years to gestate. So when the artistic directors Beth Morrison and Jecca Barry (from Beth Morrison Projects) and Kristin Marting (from HERE Arts Center) decided in June to jettison the entire slate they had planned for the 2021 edition, which runs from Jan. 8-16, they knew they would have to change tack, and fast. Especially since they did not want to simply adapt pre-existing projects for the digital world.“A bunch of people came in with stuff that was like retooling things that they already had,” Marting said. As curators, they felt that this “wasn’t the way that we can serve our audience right now,” she continued.The new 2021 festival centerpiece, “Modulation” — a commission made up of brief vocal works by the likes of Sahba Aminikia, Juhi Bansal, Yvette Janine Jackson, Angélica Negrón and Daniel Bernard Roumain — emerged as a pure product of the new moment.“We saw the opportunity to ask a lot of composers to respond to 2020, but in short bursts,” Barry said. “The three of us developed different themes for what we were interested in having them respond to, and we landed on fear, isolation and identity. Then we thought of a fourth theme to connect all of those things, and that was breath.”Except for “Ocean Body,” a ticketed video installation at HERE that features the performers Helga Davis and Shara Nova, all of Prototype 2021’s offerings are on-demand. This includes Geoff Sobelle and Pamela Z’s “Times³ (Times x Times x Times),” which can be streamed anywhere but was conceived to be heard while walking through Times Square. For Marting, the experience is typical of Prototype’s ever-questioning approach. “We’re trying to craft the conversation,” she said, “because one of the things the festival is really interested in is interrogating this line between opera and music theater, and why people think they like one and not the other.”Nathan Repasz is taking part in “The Unquestioned Interiority of Humankind,” as part of the Exponential Festival.Credit…via Exponential FestivalExponential Festival“We didn’t want to do a single Zoom reading because they’re the bane of my existence,” said Theresa Buchheister, the founding artistic director of the Exponential Festival.This is pretty much the only guarantee we can get about the 2021 edition of a fest that reliably supplies the nuttiest, most unpredictable programming of any in January.In normal years, the festival takes place at such funky Brooklyn venues as the Brick Theater, Vital Joint and Chez Bushwick. But from Jan. 7-31, each of the 31 shows on the 2021 slate will debut in one place — YouTube — and will remain available for the foreseeable future. While this is convenient for viewers, it is giving Buchheister an extra headache. “We’re dealing with nudity on YouTube, which is hard,” she said. “Performance artists are always naked, they just are. So it’s one of the many difficulties this year.”Indeed, challenges abounded. Another, for example, was figuring out how to present Panoply Performance Laboratory’s “Heidegger’s Indiana,” which Esther Neff originally envisioned as a choose-your-own-adventure show made up of distinct vignettes.“What we ended up doing is that Esther will create a work where she’s put the pieces in the order that she wants,” Buchheister said. “And I was like, ‘You can draw tarot cards, you can throw axes into a tree — I don’t care how you choose what order they go into.’ But then we’ll also create a playlist on YouTube of all of the different segments.”One of Exponential’s singularities is its emphasis on curated bills, often pairing a better-known — at least in avant-garde circles — with an up-and-comer. Buchheister was excited to link the writer-performer Jess Barbagallo and the musician Nathan Repasz. “Nathan did one of my favorite performances of 2020,” she said, “a percussion piece to Mitt Romney saying that hot dog is his favorite meat.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More