2024 Under the Radar Festival Report

A brief report on three shows being performed as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival.

The First Bad Man – Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio

Inspired and semi-based on Miranda July’s book of the same name, Pan Pan Theatre company mounts what is essentially a fake book club, where four actors play members who decide to act out scenes from the 2015 novel. Ticket holders are able to receive physical or PDF copies of the book in advance, as the site says they’d like you to be “prepared,” but can “read as much or as little as you want.”

The idea of doing homework for a play was perversely attractive but, being that July’s book isn’t exactly the Bible in you-should-know-this-ness, I decided the journalistically sound thing to do would be to go in cold. Wrong move. Though I could sense a critical tension between the book club members’ dynamics and their assumed book avatars — ostensibly the piece’s entire project — I couldn’t approach any personal interest. Oh well.

Search Party – Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theatre

The crown jewel of my UTR experience was far less high-concept—the lowest concept, actually: a salon—but the richest. Inua Ellams, whose Barber Shop Chronicles and other works of theatre and poetry stay the high-water mark in contemporary panglobal-immigrant narratives, simply sat on a couch reading assorted works from his iPad. Audience members would call out words, which he’d then search and read one or two pieces which featured them. On the night I attended, these included a letter to a former lover, written through his epochal transition from Nigeria to the U.K.; a poem told exclusively in 2020 headlines; his “Why I Write” treatise; and a gorgeous essay about a Syrian food delivery courier who tasted a ruling of the streets during lockdown. But any time with Ellams’ work—or, in this case, the man himself, whose geniality and tenderness are attractive entries into the words—is time well spent.

Volcano — St. Ann’s Warehouse

Four 45-minute ‘episodes’ comprise this dance-theatre slog by Luke Murphy, whose earlier performances in heavily thematic, movement-centric works like Sleep No More and The Grand Paradise heavily inform its approach. Except unlike those early ‘10s hits, which bank as much on roaming around atmospheric, mostly wordless spaces with a drink in hand, the (attractive) glass box in which Murphy and Will Thompson perform becomes wearying to observe.

His author’s note waxes poetic on the significance of dance and theatre yet omits mention of the form from which it most liberally borrows: film—specifically the kind of Modern Cinema 101 fare film bros are eager to tell you about. The specter of David Lynch hovers over the production’s lighting, oddness, and disembodied ‘50s girl group recordings, comingling with a plot somewhere between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar.

Though the audience can figure out pretty quickly what is occurring to the characters (they’re deep space emissaries meant to preserve aspects of humanity, or something) their activities are not compelling enough to fill in their slowly-filled gaps in knowledge. They act out scenes from game shows, wedding speeches and, sporadically thrillingly, an array of dance styles from Charlestons to raving. Their actions are meant to ‘drop hints’ throughout, but the mid-century TV news bulletins at the top of each ‘episode ‘ do the actual dirty work of explaining. It feels like a cop-out, and one about a decade too late.

The 2024 Under the Radar Festival takes place in venues throughout the city through January 21, 2024. For tickets and more information, visit here.