Category — Off Off Broadway

The Brick’s New Festival Puts Sound Design Front and Center

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Welcome to Borough Play, our exclusive series on theatre in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond.

Of all the design elements in the theatre, sound can be the hardest to notice. Sometimes, a sophisticated cue creates a barely perceptible noise that flavors our experience without jolting us. We may not realize how we’re being affected, but we’re being affected all the same.

Because their work isn’t as obvious as, say, a costumer’s, sound designers sometimes struggle to get the credit they deserve. That’s why the Brick Theater in Williamsburg is launching Sound Scape, it’s first-ever festival dedicated to sound design. From now until June 29, it will feature over a dozen productions and free events that put sound at the front of the line. (Watch a short film about the Brick Theater.)

“We love to fashion festivals around theatre artist categories that are frequently uncelebrated,” says Michael Gardner, the Brick’s co-founder and artistic director. Previously, the Brick has had festivals for fight choreographers, clowns, filmmakers, and gamers. (The theatre’s gaming festival will return in July).

For Gardner, though, Sound Scape is especially personal. “Sound design is often upstaged by other technology elements, but it has always remained crucial to my own theatre passion,” he says. As a boy he had a prized cassette tape of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play that requires a full orchestra and an actor. “It changed the way I thought about theatre,” he recalls. “Instead of squinting from the balcony of the Kennedy Center at an over-budgeted prestige play, suddenly there was theatre in my bedroom inside a pair of headphones.”

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From time to time, TDF Stages will highlight exciting Off and Off-Off Broadway theatre companies with exclusive “getting to know you” videos. Today, we’re featuring Wild Project, an eco-friendly, up-for-anything theatre in the East Village that gives a home to some of New York’s most adventurous artists.

Currently, Wild Project is featuring the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival.

Watch the rest of our Meet the Theatre Videos right here!

This video was directed by Mark Blankenship, TDF’s online content editor, and shot and edited by Nicholas Guldner.

Iphigenia pushes the RIOULT dance company to new places

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French choreographer Pascal Rioult has been fascinated with Greek mythology for decades. He not only delved into the stories academically as a teenager, but also as a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company (the great lady of modern dance was a myth-ophile, too).

Now, with his contemporary company RIOULT, he’s tackling the narrative depth of his beloved genre with Iphigenia, which appears at the Joyce Theater from June 4-9.

Rioult is thrilled to create his own version of the story about Agamemnon’s daughter, who is miraculously saved moments before Agamemnon sacrifices her to the goddess Artemis. “I’ve been thinking about this piece for 30 years,” says Rioult, with a laugh. “I’ve always been fascinated by this young girl, Iphigenia, fighting for her life and her transfiguration. After not wanting to die at a young age, she realizes the only way to have a decent ending is to decide, on her own, that’s she’ll willingly be sacrificed. She morphs from an innocent girl to a pleading young woman to a hero. She is stronger at the end than everyone around her; it’s inspiring.”

While Rioult investigated Greek mythology abstractly with a dreamy piece about Helen of Troy in 2011, this current, drastic move to storytelling has been challenging for a variety of reasons: Most obviously, it’s a dance with a storyline, which demands a specific set of artistic choices. It also involves a live narrator and is staged in the round on a deck reminiscent of Greek amphitheaters. Plus, Rioult collaborated with composer Michael Torke to create new music for the piece as part of his Dance to Contemporary Composers series.

“This is totally foreign to me,” Rioult says. “And my dancers, who are modern dancers of mostly abstract work, are being asked to portray characters. It’s new to us all!”
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Shadows drops audiences in an immersive world

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Welcome to Borough Play, our exclusive series on theatre in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond.

For Alec Duffy, artistic director of the Obie-winning theatre group Hoi Polloi, watching a DVD of John Cassavetes’ Shadows provided a light bulb moment. “About halfway through watching I was like, ‘Damn. This would be so great with live actors in a theatrical environment.’”

The 1959 film, which takes on interracial relationships and is performed in an improvisatory style, seemed like the perfect piece of art to stage in an immersive manner. “The movie is a perfect marriage of radical content and radical form,” Duffy says. “There are fights and people grappling with each other. It’s about the deep difficulties of sexual relationships, and the film has a high naturalism to it.” He adds that he’d never seen a movie so messy that managed to feel so true to life. “I like pieces that reflect the complexities of our living. That excited me about the movie. I thought by staging it with actors sitting next to audience members on couches, it would capture the intimacy of the film—whereas putting it on a stage 20 feet away would lose something.”

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Lucas Hnath’s experimental new drama explores chaos and control via the Magic Kingdom

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It seems so easy to get a handle on A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, the new play by Lucas Hnath that’s now at Soho Rep.

After all, the story is right there in the title: A group of actors gather to read a screenplay that Walt Disney supposedly wrote about his life. When we enter the theatre, we see an anonymous lecture hall/rehearsal space, with cast members sitting behind tables while they drink their water and graze on bowls of snacks. Eventually, Walt (Larry Pine) enters, and he sits down to play himself—the star of his own movie. As he reads through scenes about Disneyworld and nature documentaries, it seems like we’re getting a clever little comedy about an irascible Hollywood legend.

Then everything breaks apart. Walt keeps cutting scenes that make him angry, for instance, but why is he upset about a movie he wrote himself? And why is the actress playing his daughter sulking away to a corner? Isn’t she just playing a character? Or is she somehow turning into Walt’s child?

And what about the handkerchiefs? Walt has several coughing fits that interrupt the story, and almost every time he pulls a handkerchief away from his mouth, it’s covered with blood. Things were supposed to be light and fun, but now, they’re stained bright red.

For Hnath, this intrusion is vital to the show. “There’s the visible world and the invisible world in this play, and then there are moments when there’s a crossover,” he says. “When there’s that crossover, there’s a feeling of a séance. The spirit is summoned very briefly. You get a glimpse of something, and it goes away. I find those moments very uncanny and engaging.”

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