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      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

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      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More

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      Review: Theater Professors Are Under the Gun in ‘Preparedness’

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      In this workplace comedy, beleaguered colleagues struggle to come together for an active-shooter training exercise.Theater people and academics share two traits: They are convinced of their calling’s moral importance to the world, which can provide a feeling of superiority, but they also often feel misunderstood and beleaguered, which makes them defensive. As members of a university’s theater department, the characters in Hillary Miller’s new comedy “Preparedness” — presented by the Bushwick Starr and HERE — belong to both constituencies, which means that their shoulders slump under boulder-size chips.That wariness is warranted, though, as their department is under attack from the university’s brass, which wants not just to cut their budget, but eliminate the program altogether.Figurative and literal survival become entangled when an irrepressibly chirpy H.R. representative, Kath (Alison Cimmet), turns up in the department’s shabby — and decidedly not chic — conference-slash-break room. If the teachers undergo state-mandated training on how to handle a potential mass shooting, they will have a better chance of surviving both a gunman and the dean’s delete button.An assistant professor in the English department at Queens College and the author of books on theater, Miller is fluent in academia’s quirks and jargon, as well as interdepartmental rivalries — don’t get the theater professors started on their brethren in film and digital tech. She also nails bureaucracies’ love for acronyms, deployed here in a dizzying alphabet soup that includes MeRP (Mutual Respect Pledge), ACOST (Active Campus Operations Shooter Training) and GOHOHOF (Get Out, Hide Out, Help Out, Fight), as well as references to “FERPP requests” and “FULAP forms.”Miller and the director Kristjan Thor neatly sketch certain types that turn up in pretty much every group of educators. Most memorable are the beleaguered chairman, Jeff (Lou Liberatore), doing his darnedest to save his department, and Laurette (the wonderful Nora Cole, master of the haughty side eye), a grande dame prone to statement shawls and imbued with the authority that comes from charisma, experience and lofty ideals about her vocation. “We’re theater artists,” she says. “We create sacred spaces for a living!”Just as familiar is the high-strung, humorless Haydée García-Shelton (Tracy Hazas), who seems to have a hard time gelling with her colleagues — she casually informs them that she got married over the weekend, as if it were no big deal — and shows disdain for musicals and their fans. “If you ask these people about my work, they’ll pretend to care, and then they’ll go right back to pushing their GoFundMe for bouffant wigs,” she says. One guess as to who will eventually use pepper spray.Getting this motley bunch to agree on anything, especially an administrative injunction perceived as an imposition, is akin to herding cats — real ones, unlike Cat Blanchett, the department’s new robotic “Resilience Mascot,” a gesture meant to help improve the sinking morale.Liberatore (with Hazas at right) shows off the department’s “Resilience Mascot,” a robot named Cat Blanchett.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUltimately, though, Miller can’t resolve a central issue: Some of the professors’ refusal to undergo training is mystifying. It’s easy to understand resistance to H.R., but a quick training session that both covers a very real concern — mass shootings in schools — and saves your funding feels like a gimme. And yet they bicker.Having painted herself into a corner, Miller can’t figure out how to end the play. So she gives Laurette, who is retiring, the last word in the form of an address to her students. It is a good speech, and a dodge.PreparednessThrough Dec. 11 at HERE Arts Center, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Islander,’ the Puck Stops Here

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      This verbatim hockey drama considers issues of masculinity and the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players.The 2017 season didn’t start too badly. The New York Islanders, a National Hockey League team with a new coach and a newish berth at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, might have allowed a few too many shots on goal, but they still won most of their games. A couple of months later, in December, it all began to go wrong. Then it went more wrong. The defense fell apart. The team missed the playoffs. John Tavares, the Islanders’ captain and star player, departed for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Fans revolted.The director Katie Brook and the playwright Liza Birkenmeier, hockey fans both, have scraped some of that bad ice into “Islander,” a verbatim piece at HERE. Presented by Tele-Violet and supported by New Georges, the play borrows commentary from the season and puts it in the mouth of a bearded, sweatpants-clad, aggressively average dude called Man (David Gould). (The sources aren’t listed, but Man’s language suggests live broadcast commentary, postgame interviews and fan forums.)Additional text is culled from the celebrity academic and men’s rights stan Jordan Peterson. Imagine a snow cone that’s part obsession, part self-justification, part masculine fragility, sweetened with self-pity and sweat, and you’re mostly there.Brook and Birkenmeier (“Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) are interested in questions of identity, identification and form. They have structured “Islander” a little like a game. It begins with the national anthem and pauses for a halftime dance break. A bare stage, carpeted in rubber tiles, stands in for the rink. (The set and lighting design are by Josh Smith.) But there’s just one player — and then toward the end, a second (Dick Toth) and a third (Aksel Latham-Mitchell, a child actor who also provides a drum solo). If you’re looking for the nail-biting narrative propulsion of a proper game, look elsewhere. A buzzer beater, “Islander” is not.It does, though, probe some fascinating ideas, like the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players — a level of mimetic engagement that theater rarely achieves, Broadway musicals excepted. No man is an island, but a lot of men, recliner-bound and alone with their Wi-Fi, seem to consider themselves Islanders. And fan forums and postgame debriefs provide the rare spaces in American life where men are actively encouraged to talk about their feelings. In these homosocial arenas, they confess their self-doubt, their disappointment and their feelings of low self-worth.Gould, air guitaring away self-doubt and disappointment in “Islanders.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m very arrogant,” Man says. “I’m very lost within myself. I’m as sick of me as you are.” (Less helpfully, these are also spaces for some men to justify their mediocrity.) But the script — a latticework of unconnected observations — has a way of flattening out these ideas, compressing them like the air mattress that Latham-Mitchell’s John Tavares cheerfully deflates.“Islander” isn’t long, just 75 minutes, about the same as a hockey game. But since it offers so little in the way of plot or character, it feels longer. The language of commentary isn’t particularly interesting, though there are blazes of figuration (“He makes them as uncomfortable as a beached whale”), a few snappy neologisms (“Sneakery: Is that a word?”) and the occasional metaphor melee.While Gould is a charmer — precise, inexhaustible, brave enough to dance with his shirt off — there is only so much an actor can do when stringing together disjointed fan forum posts and meditations that only an extremely concussed Marcus Aurelius might write: “Good is the enemy of great. No more good; it’s time to be great.”Maybe “Islander,” like many N.H.L. games, is better experienced via a highlights reel.IslanderThrough Sept. 4 at HERE, Manhattan; 212-647-0202, Here.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Dudes on Ice: A Play About Hockey Tackles Masculinity, Too

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      “Islander,” a skewed look at a New York Islanders season, examines extreme fandom, violence and the thrill of sports.Hockey is a brutal game: In what other sport are missing teeth a badge of honor? Not that Liza Birkenmeier and Katie Brook were in any danger of losing Chiclets as they stared down a puck: Not only were they playing air hockey instead of the ice-rink version, but they also seemed to prefer huddling on the same side of the table rather than face each other.Clearly Birkenmeier, a playwright, and Brook, a director, like being on the same team. They started working together almost 10 years ago and their fruitful collaboration includes the well-received “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” and the new “Islander,” a skewed look at the New York Islanders’ fateful 2017-18 season, when the team failed to make the playoffs and its star, John Tavares, was about to become a free agent. (The show was originally slated for March 2020 and opened Saturday at HERE Arts Center.)There have been quite a few sports-themed plays by women in recent years, most notably Sarah DeLappe’s soccer-centric hit “The Wolves” and Lydia R. Diamond’s portrait of a barrier-shattering baseball player, “Toni Stone,” but they have focused on the female athletic experience.“Islander,” on the other hand, zeros in on “dudes doing dude stuff,” as Birkenmeier put it. An extreme version of dude stuff: Professional hockey is “unhinged and violent and white,” she said. In other words, it provides a fine lens through which to look at modern masculinity and its discontents.John Tavares playing for the New York Islanders in 2017. He was the team’s star and was about to become a free agent.Nick Wass/Associated PressTo do so, Birkenmeier, 35, and Brook, 39, pulled lines from game commentary and analysis, and podcasts like “Islanders Anxiety.” Then those sources were edited into a quasi-monologue for a composite character referred to simply as Man (David Gould) — so “Islander” is also a sly reflection on solo shows by the likes of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray.There is a certain affection, too, as Birkenmeier and Brook enjoy watching hockey, not just using it as a decoder ring for male behavior. A few days before previews started, the two women turned up at a Brooklyn games emporium for a chat about pucks and violence. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The show’s narrator is obsessive, whiny, triumphant, analytical, bellicose, despondent — all the stages of fandom. What impression are you trying to create?LIZA BIRKENMEIER We’re highlighting the ridiculousness of his struggle as opposed to empathizing with it.KATIE BROOK We’re leaning into the haplessness of it: It’s not a hero’s journey, although he thinks it is. The dance we do is to engage the audience enough that you think you’re going along with him and then you kind of back off.Do you think professional sports foster a kind of stereotypical masculinity, or do they help channel it so the rest of us are a little bit safer?BROOK [Laughs] It’s a good outlet but it also reinforces things that I think are bad. Amateur sports are actually wonderful and must be kept separate in some ways, but professional sports, in part just because of the basics of capitalism, have to be violent and extreme. Basketball is not that way.BIRKENMEIER Or baseball. Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy. It’s part of the sensationalism. I do think it’s very poisonous. The ideas of legacy and dignity and loyalty come up so violently.According to Birkenmeier, right, “Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesWhy do you think theater hasn’t really tackled hard-core fandoms, either in sports or pop culture, considering the huge part they play in modern life?BROOK I don’t think there’s a lot of satire in theater these days. That may be part of it. Also a well-made play is based on things that we should all be able to relate to, like real estate. A lot of them hinge on the loss of the family home or whatever — some big events that everyone can agree is a big deal. But people can’t really relate to most obsessions. Those people are all on the same page about how important it is — it’s for them, not for us.BIRKENMEIER Sometimes we underestimate that sports is better theater: It’s so much like a play except you literally don’t know what’s going to happen and somebody has to win. A hockey game as a community event is potentially more exciting than a play.BROOK Well, most people think that.What was it like researching the show?BIRKENMEIER Watching the games at bars, I would sit and take notes and men would quiz me. They wouldn’t believe that I was into it. They would ask, “Who’s your favorite player?”BROOK That’s a softball question.BIRKENMEIER It is, and often they’d be like, “Is your favorite player John Tavares?” Or ask me what I thought of the last game. Or ask me what I thought of the new or old management, or whose contract was going to be up.BROOK Insulting flirting: They want to show that they’re smarter than you, but it’s supposed to be a flirtation.BIRKENMEIER Oh my God, I never took it as flirtation! I would have been more flattered. One guy was really excited about the play.Did you go to many games as well?BROOK We went to a bunch of games in Brooklyn and no one was there. After John Tavares left the [Islanders] and joined the [Toronto] Maple Leafs, I went to Nassau Coliseum at the first game against the Leafs and it was horrific. The fans were so angry, they kept yelling “We don’t need you!” every time John came on the ice. It was scary, actually. It’s not a show about violence but there is a sort of underlying fear that this guy [the narrator] is threatening, somehow.BIRKENMEIER I generally think it’s important to be funny. It’s very easy to take this and to take a serious skewering look at it.BROOK No one needs to suffer right now.BIRKENMEIER Let’s have fun, you know? More

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      La MaMa’s Season Includes an Indigenous Take on Shakespeare

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      A version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is planned, along with the company’s puppet series, an examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and more.In a season that is expected to include the reopening of its flagship theater after a three-year, $24 million renovation, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present an Indigenous take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a vaudeville concert that explores the history of cannabis.“We’re in a revolutionary time right now,” Mia Yoo, the artistic director of the theater, on the Lower East Side, said in an interview, “and we need to think about who the voices are that we need to look to to guide us.”The original home of La MaMa, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is at 74A East Fourth Street. It is slated to reopen in January with two flexible, acoustically separated theaters; green rooms; a cafe; and an open-air roof terrace. All of the shows this season will take place at two of the company’s other spaces — the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs, both at 66 East Fourth Street. When 74A is reopened there will be an additional slate of productions announced.The season will kick off with the La MaMa Puppet Series (Sept. 27-Oct. 24), a biannual festival of new contemporary puppet theater. It will be followed by in-person and online performances of “A Few Deep Breaths” (Oct. 27-30), a collaboration among seven writers, including Adrienne Kennedy, Chuck Mee and Robert Patrick, that premiered online at La MaMa in June and is a co-presentation with CultureHub, La MaMa’s digital arts division.The world premiere of James E. Reynolds’s “History/Our Story: The Trail to Tulsa” will run Dec. 9 through Dec. 12. Dance, music and spoken word performances will examine the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of America’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence. There will be a post-performance audience discussion following the show.In January, La MaMa, HERE Arts Center and the Prototype Festival will present the world premiere of Talvin Wilks and Baba Israel’s “Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville,” exploring the history of the plant through music, dance and spoken word. Also in January, the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s “God’s Fool,” an interpretation of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, will have its world premiere.The world premiere of “Misdemeanor Dream,” a Native American adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will open in March. The production, which has a cast of 20 Indigenous actors, will be performed by Spiderwoman Theater, an all-women Native American company, and directed by Muriel Miguel, the company’s founder and artistic director.Later in the spring, Qendra Multimedia, a Kosovo-based cultural organization that focuses on contemporary theater and literature, and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company will present the U.S. premiere of “Balkan Bordello,” a play aiming to expose the fragility of democracy within the framework of Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia. And concluding the season, in May, will be the New York premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s reimagined musical composition “The Beautiful Lady,” which adapts the words of Russian poets who lived and performed in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It will be directed by Anne Bogart, one of the founders of SITI Company, which will take its final bow in 2022.Audience members must show proof of vaccination to attend performances, and masks are required at all times. Children under the age of 12 are welcome, but must be masked. For more information, visit lamama.org. More

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      Next From Taylor Mac: A Post-Pandemic Pandemic Play — Set in 1918

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      “Joy and Pandemic” is slated to be performed this fall before an in-person audience at the Magic Theater in San Francisco.What kind of art the coronavirus pandemic will inspire remains an open question. But the playwright and performer Taylor Mac has spent much of the past year of theatrical shutdown creating a work about the last Big One.“Joy and Pandemic,” set during the influenza pandemic of 1918, will have its premiere in September at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. And if all goes according to plan, it will be with an in-person audience.“The pandemic has taught me to be skeptical of certainty,” Sonia Fernandez, the Magic’s interim artistic director, said in an email confirming the production. “That said, we are optimistic that we will be able to ensure a safe environment to produce the play with the artistic rigor it deserves.”Mac is best known for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a marathon 24-hour performance piece that took in all of American history through song, refracted through a radical queer lens (and involving some exuberant audience participation). “Joy and Pandemic,” inspired in part by some of Mac’s research for that show, had actually been commissioned by the Magic, a 144-seat nonprofit theater with which he has a long association, before the current pandemic hit.“At first, I thought about dropping the flu aspect,” Mac said in a phone interview last week. “It seemed maybe too on the nose. But then I thought it will be nice to ritualize this experience by making a play that’s not necessarily about this flu, but is about this moment in time.”“Joy and Pandemic” is set in Philadelphia in September 1918, at the tail end of World War I, on the day of the huge Liberty Loan Parade that became an infamous super-spreader event, though it also bounces forward in time to 1951. It takes place in a children’s art school (inspired by one Mac’s mother ran), and it deals in part with Christian Science, in which Mac was raised.“It’s so much about what our beliefs are, what somebody else’s reality is, and how those two things match up,” Mac (who will not appear in the play) said.Mac’s work, even more than most live theater, is based on the opposite of social distancing. Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which was in previews at the Flea in New York when the coronavirus hit, featured audience seating inside a giant ball pit, where the actors metaphorically mud-wrestled.During the past year of shutdown, Mac has been developing “Joy and Pandemic” with the director Loretta Greco, via Zoom. Mac (who at the start of the pandemic also created an artist-led mutual aid effort called The Trickle Up) missed the normal in-person process of “hanging out with everybody and talking about ideas and surprising each other,” and then inviting the audience in.“Being in a room together with other people, that’s the whole point,” Mac said. “I’m in it for the hang.”And “The Hang,” as it happens, is also the title of another upcoming Mac world premiere, scheduled for January 2022, at the Here Arts Center in New York City. Mac, who will perform in the show, would describe it only as “a musical theater piece,” but not a musical per se, created in collaboration with the composer and musical director Matt Ray, the costume designer Machine Dazzle, the director Niegel Smith and others from the “24-Decade” team. 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