Category — Off Off Broadway

The BFG collective brings a bold experiment to Queens

There’s a bold theatre experiment happening in Queens, and the Martians are just the beginning.

From now through July 1, three celebrated off-Off Broadway companies—Boomerang Theatre, Flux Theatre Ensemble, and Gideon Productions—are jointly presenting their seasons at the Secret Theatre in Long Island City. They’re calling themselves the BFG Collective, and together, they’re mounting seven shows.

Here’s how it works: In January, Gideon presented part one of Mac Rogers’ The Honeycomb Trilogy, a series of sci-fi dramas about a mission to Mars that changes life on Earth. Part two, Blast Radius, arrives on March 29, and part three bows in June.

In between the pieces of the trilogy, the other theatres are producing work in the same space. Through March 25, Boomerang presents a repertory of Much Ado About Nothing, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Spring Tides, a new play by Melissa Gawlowski about a pregnant woman who accidentally stumbles into another universe. On April 28, Flux premieres Deinde, August Schulenburg’s drama about the terrifying consequences of an attempt to cure a global pandemic. (TDF members can currently buy tickets to Boomerang’s shows via the off-Off @ $9 program.)

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Choreographer Jody Oberfelder follows the heart

When it comes to art and music, nothing is more cliché than “matters of the heart.” So when choreographer Jody Oberfelder began work on THROB, a new piece about the vital organ, she knew she had to be innovative. Fascinated by both science and emotion, Oberfelder read textbooks, interviewed cardiologists, and looked deeply into her own visceral experience. “I want to be sure it’s not a Hallmark card,” she explains. “I’m going more for the endurance and heroics of life itself.”

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Qui Nguyen celebrates his family with rebellious style

Sometimes it takes years to find a way into a story, especially when it’s personal.

Qui Nguyen’s grandmother died the day he began graduate school at Ohio University. To honor her memory and his family history, he wanted to write about his cousin Hung, who escaped from Vietnam by boat when he was a young boy. Not yet secure in his own voice, Nguyen took the advice of professors and peers: Capture the essence; scrap the boring parts; make the characters young adults instead of children; tell a traditional, serious Asian-American story. The result was Trial by Water, Nguyen’s first off-Broadway production.

When Nguyen’s parents and Hung came to see the show, the playwright was surprised at their reactions. “They didn’t recognize it as our story. Hung didn’t recognize it as his,” Nguyen says. “At that moment, I just felt like a complete failure.”

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How “The Navigator” got nurtured into success

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Welcome to the first installment of From Page to Stage, a column that explores how new plays make it to their first productions.

If a new play is going to thrive, then it needs to be nurtured from its initial draft through its first production. Playwrights need resources every step of the way to know if their script is actually working in real time with real actors and designers, but often, financial realities mean that support can be very difficult to get.

The WorkShop Theater, however, is part of a forward-looking subculture of New York City companies that offers a complete array of programs to follow a play from baby steps to graduation. Their current show, The Navigator, is what Artistic Director Scott Sickles describes as “an ideal illustration of that process.”

Eddie Antar’s play, an 80-minute surreal car ride with a man and his frighteningly knowledgeable GPS system, had a three-week run last year as part of WorkShop’s Play-in-Progress (PIP) program. With a mere $300 budget, it was nonetheless nominated for eight New York Innovative Theatre Awards and won two, for director Leslie Kincaid Burby and lighting designer Duane Pagano. Now, Burby is reprising her work with a (slightly) larger budget at WorkShop’s 60-seat mainstage theatre in midtown.

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Reimagining Adam Guettel’s beloved song cycle

Myths and Hymns is practically begging to be interpreted and reinterpreted on stage.

Written by composer-lyricist Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza, Floyd Collins), it’s a song cycle that uses mythology, religious allusions, and the lyrics to classic hymns to explore massive themes like ambition, love, and death. Yet for all their all grandeur, the songs are easily accessible, influenced not only by European art songs and show tunes, but also by gospel, R&B, and Latin music.

As of today, however, there have only been sixteen official performances of Myths and Hymns in New York City, and those were in 1998, when the show was called Saturn Returns and got a brief concert staging at the Public Theater. Since then, a celebrated recording featuring Kristen Chenoweth, Audra McDonald, and Billy Porter has carried on the music’s legacy, but that’s just not the same as a living, breathing production.

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