A January Festival Roundup — Review

Senior Critic Joey Sims has been very busy running around New York City as festival season is here. Below, a roundup of some of what he's been seeing.

DREAM FEED

Presented by HERE Arts Center & Under the Radar

The night before attending Dream Feed, I had a nightmare. In that nightmare, I was trapped on a sinking ship—a cruise liner, for some reason. My dream ended right before the moment of drowning, as they tend to do. I awoke with an overwhelming feeling of dread; it quickly passed. 

Theatrical family band The HawtPlates’ surreal new musical journey Dream Feed, now at HERE Arts Center through February 1, artfully captures the destabilizing and often terrifying world of the dreamscape. Utilizing the trio’s blending voices, dangling chimes and even an autoharp, performers Jade Hicks, Justin Hicks and Kenita Miller-Hicks conjure a musical soundbath that, at its most intense, does hit upon that body-enveloping unease that lingers after a nightmare. 

At other points, Dream Feed is softer and more contemplative piece. That whiplash is intentional, but the tonal variations do sometimes make it hard to lock in. In seeking to capture the multiplicity of the dream state, the trio and director Philip Howze have consciously set aside any hope of a central, driving focus, for better and worse. 

I did fall asleep at one point in Dream Feed. But I think that’s okay. My nap felt almost baked into the dramaturgy—awakening abruptly, I felt confused at first, then gradually found my way back into the disordered musical journey. Like our best and worst dreams, Dream Feed is unsettling and soothing in equal measure.

IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Presented by New York Theatre Workshop & Under the Radar

At a talkback following my performance of Roger Guenveur Smith’s quietly devastating solo piece In Honor of Jean-Michael Basquiat, the moderator opened by asking Smith if he wanted to describe his process. Staring into the middle distance, one hand held contemplatively at his chin, Smith smiled and silently shook his head. The audience tittered; Smith sent some warmth the moderator’s way, wryly offsetting any potential arrogance in the response. (He went on to answer other questions at length.)

That simple “No,” felt in keeping with Smith’s understated approach to his art, as clearly evidenced by the piece we’d just watched. Much like the writer/performer’s previous works (Smith has created multiple solo shows, though he is best known for acting Spike Lee joints), Basquiat is a sparing piece, forthright in its telling and unfussy in form. Speaking in his signature poetic style, Smith stands at a single microphone in a sea of darkness. The stripped-down staging keeps our focus on Smith’s words as he carefully sifts through memories of his friend, the revolutionary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Ghostly lighting (by Arlo Sanders) and a transporting soundscape (created live each night by Marc Anthony Thompson) give Smith’s recollections a haunted, mournful air. He does not pretend to have been a close confidant of Basquiat’s—all the stories we hear, of raucous late nights out in New York, are likely the extent of the relationship. But Smith offers these memories as a gift, while also placing Basquiat’s loss, without falseness or strained grandeur, within a larger tapestry of extraordinary Black lives tragically cut short. 

TIME SIGNATURES

Presented by Exponential Festival 

On an anonymous chat forum tucked away in the deepest, darkest corners of the internet, a group of suicidal individuals find community. Each has a plan to end their lives; each has set a date for the event, their despair organized into a collective schedule. 

Not that they actually talk about killing themselves that much. Mostly they chat about work, or movies, or, pretty much whatever. 

Noah Latty’s bold, morbidly funny new work walks an impressive tightrope, hitting on every triggering topic imaginable with an unfailingly delicate touch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a play dare to mention carnography before, let alone offer sympathy and complexity to those who seek it out. (These gruesome videos are fake, the group assures themselves—almost definitely fake.) 

Time Signatures is overly lengthy, asking us to sit with the darkest of despair for longer than it should. It is also witty and deeply moving, treating every member of its 9 (!) person ensemble with tender care. We may not know their names, but each has an arc—and through hints scattered across Latty’s text, we learn so much more about them than they’d ever intended to publicly share. 

This is a tricky play, and demands an ensemble working in perfect sync. Impressively, given the tight timeframe on an Exponential production, this cast walks that tonal tightrope near-flawlessly. Standouts include a shattering Kayla Juntilla, an improbably funny Felix Teich and a hilariously chillaxed Leah Plante-Wiener. 

GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME

Presented by The Wooster Group & Under the Radar

Every festival season has its reliable regulars, performers who somehow pop up more than once within a single frantic January. This year, one of those is actor/writer Eric Berryman. First a standout of The Team’s UTR piece Reconstructing, Berryman then jumped directly into a two night run of poetry revue Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me at Joe’s Pub. 

Berryman is masterful as always, his wry wit finely balanced by an endearing sincerity. He is also the best thing about this distinctive piece, a live album of “toasts,” lewd poetry from the Black-American oral tradition, that originated at The Wooster Group. (Kate Valk directs, conjuring a live radio broadcast; Jharis Yokley joins Berryman on the drums.) 

The “toasts,” all delivered by Berryman with expert comic timing, are fascinating historical artifacts (all the more so because we can never know their authors, since the stories were passed down in an oral tradition). But they are also repetitive, most centering on lustful, “whorish” women inflicting themselves upon stereotypically brutish Black men. My objection is not a moral one—there is, to be sure, a self-awareness around these clichés—but rather that repeated variants on the same story just grow dull. 

Still, my performance of Swim Like Me did feature one killer moment of improvisation between Berryman and his drummer, Yokley. Berryman asked his companion where he’d recommend listeners go in New York for great jazz . Yokley, after a long pause, deadpanned that he’d tell them, “You are seven years too late.” Adding a bit more banter between these two, the live storytellers sitting in front of us today, might help lend Swim Like Me some welcome variation. 

VOYAGE INTO INFINITY

Presented by NYU Skirball & Under the Radar

An elaborate Rube Goldberg machine fills every nook and cranny of NYU Skirball’s expansive stage. Three doll-like figures in creepy masks, pigtails and square-dancing dresses, emerge from a treehouse. They inspect the massive set-up with childlike wonder. Then. as a live musical score creeps in (played live by Holland Andrews), the three begin to wreak havoc. 

Or at least, havoc is the goal in Narcissister’s new piece. An ambitious work, Infinity plays on intriguing questions around the unseen labor of women in holding up the structures of our daily existence—and that very alluring instinct, more understandable each day, to let it all come crashing down. 

But the company has not yet figured out how to traverse the long-periods of silent setup in between each chain-reaction of destruction. The destruction itself, when it arrives, is eminently satisfying; the finale, which blows the staging wide open, is a thrill. But at least half of Infinity is spent watching the performers do prep work, long sections of menial labor that kill any building energy or momentum.

FRIDAY NIGHT RAT CATCHERS

Presented by Live Artery; co-commissioned by Under the Radar

A demented circus of capitalistic chaos. I can’t claim to fully understand or explain Friday Night Rat Catchers, a dance spectacle co-created by Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein alongside devising partner Marianne Rendón. All three perform the work together, stumbling between manic extremities of stifling contemporary life. “Hosted” by a grinning talk-show presenter type near the end of his rope (Rendón), Rat Catchers is an absurdly entertaining cavalcade of desperate clownery. 

My personal favorite vignette was the “Where are my AirPods?” dance, performed by Engelstein. “Where are my AirPods??” she asked us, over and over, checking every pocket, scouring every corner, contorting to look every which way. “Where are my AirPods?” There’s an old adage about repeating a gag so many times that it first becomes unfunny, then circles back around to being funnier than ever before—this trio understands how to craft a great skit.

FAGGOTICA

Presented by Exponential Festival

Due to a tragically ill-conceived staging, the action of Aeon Andreas’ intriguingly dreamlike nightclub romp Faggotica was entirely obstructed for the bulk of its audience. Standing in mosh-pits on either side of a playing area, myself and other spectators strained to catch a glimpse of the performers. Without a raised stage, most of us couldn’t see a thing. I gave up after 30 minutes, as did several others. Hopefully, the show’s creators and Exponential Fest can better serve these (very talented) performers in future by staging a show that the audience can actually see.

TIME PASSES (FOR ELLEN BRODY)

Presented by The Goat Exchange & Exponential Festival

Nearly the full text “Time Passes,” the decade-spanning middle section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, is performed by (semi-ornamental) wife figure Ellen Brody from the movie Jaws as she putters around cooking, cleaning, and lounging at the beach, in this melancholy Goat Exchange creation. 

Sure! Why not? Ellen here delivers most of the lines intended for husband Richard Brody (Roy Schneider on screen) to a huge inflatable shark that sits at the center of Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky’s delightfully off-kilter staging at Target Margin’s Doxsee space in Sunset Park.

“Wanna get drunk and fool around?” Ellen proffers to the shark, patting the blow-up creature on its side flirtatiously. 

What does it all mean? Certainly the Goat Exchange team are having fun with Ellen’s relative unimportance to the overall picture of Jaws, a deeply masculine work. Given how large the shark looms in the mind of this movie’s men, she might as well be talking directly to ‘ol Bruce half the time. 

Meanwhile the dense text of Lighthouse, tracing nature’s gradual reclamation of a country home left to rot, wittily mirrors the unexamined daily life of Ellen as she waits at home for Richard to return from the (shark) wars. 

Okay, so parts of that are a little fuzzy. Time Passes is very funny, and the staging is certainly a giddy thrill. But the larger import does feel hazy. The overarching focus seems to ultimately land on the despair of the housewife, but I feel certain that Goat Exchange—an increasingly essential fixture on the downtown scene—is aiming a bit higher. Time Passes is still seeking out that solid berth.