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    Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

    Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More

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    ‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a Dollhouse

    #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 Pick‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a DollhouseCleverly edited and darkly funny, the latest Theater in Quarantine show finds a nervous couple afraid to go out or let anyone in. Sound familiar?Lee Minora, left, and Joshua William Gelb in Scott R. Sheppard’s “Blood Meal,” which is shot and edited live with the actors in different settings.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineFeb. 2, 2021The bugs have made Sam and Lindsay prisoners of their own home. To battle the invasion, the couple live in bare rooms, the furniture wrapped in plastic. They don’t leave the house and don’t welcome anybody in, either: They refuse entry to Girl Scouts selling cookies and after drinks with friends on the porch — in the middle of winter — they throw their clothes in garbage bags.Any resemblance to a certain pandemic is entirely not coincidental, and in just 32 minutes Scott R. Sheppard’s darkly funny new play, “Blood Meal,” captures our zeitgeist with satirical accuracy.What makes the show even zeitgeistier is that it is the latest salvo from the prime purveyor of inventive stagecraft in the age of Covid: Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin’s Theater in Quarantine.For the past 10 months, the pair have turned a small closet in Gelb’s apartment into a performing space that has hosted everything from an “expressionistic musical portrait” of Mother Teresa (“I Am Sending You the Sacred Face”) to an adaptation of a Polish science-fiction story (“The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy”).In creating Theater in Quarantine, Gelb (with Minora) has shot many pieces from a closet in his apartment.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in Quarantine“Blood Meal” ups the ante: Gelb (who directed and plays Sam) and Lee Minora (Lindsay) are performing live from separate closets — hers was built in the basement of La MaMa. The magic of technology brings the actors together so Sam and Lindsay can have sex and share a bath. We even watch them move about a cross-section of their home, as if it were a dollhouse. (Gelb and Stivo Arnoczy did the video design; Alex Hawthorn was responsible for the software that synced the action.)The setting itself creates a strange combination of the mundane and the surreal that perfectly suits Sheppard’s sensibility. He co-wrote the Off Off Broadway hit “Underground Railroad Game,” about children and adults re-enacting slavery scenarios, and last June contributed “Topside,” a claustrophobic, unsettling play inspired by the Donald Barthelme nuclear-cloud short-story “Game” to the growing Theater in Quarantine catalog.The zippy “Blood Meal,” which is free on YouTube, is an even better piece than “Topside” because it so skillfully maps a familiar world where an invisible danger lurks everywhere. McLaughlin’s matching costumes for Lindsay and Sam, black with red accessories, make them look like two mimes flailing in paranoid domesticity at the end of the world.Sam is at the end of his rope and desperately wants to believe the infestation has run its course so they can get back to normal and maybe even stop sleeping in the kitchen.Editing technology allows the viewers to watch Minora and Gelb, being filmed separately, take a bath together.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineLindsay has a more jaundiced attitude. “If we are serious about fighting these bugs, we must always doubt that we are free of them,” she tells him. “Do you understand that? It’s about doubt.”But she starts having the wrong kind of doubt as she increasingly suspects Sam of surreptitiously meeting people outside. Her nagging suspicions and his equivocations drive a wedge in the heretofore united couple. Eventually, Sam pleads for Lindsay to join him in an escape: “Let’s get in the Jetta and take the mountain,” he pleads. “Let’s drink black Manhattans and cuddle like bobcats.”Watching this live play on a screen, at a remove, it’s hard not to think, “Can I come too?”Blood MealOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube pageAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More