Archive: Theater
Belleville, a new play in its debut run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is most provocatively a conversation of objects—most of them of the innocuous, household variety. A baby monitor is broken apart by a frazzled woman who mistakes the cries it emits as those of her unborn niece. A man makes a meager peace offering to his reasonably fed-up landlord with a half-filled hash pipe; later, he forces a buttery pastry into his unwilling, not to mention hung over, wife's face out of desperation, though not until after she's performed impromptu surgery on a broken toenail with a large butcher's knife. A stemless wine glass, the bottom stained with at least two-day-old cheap red residue, sits on a dining table stage right throughout the drama's duration as a kind of emblem of the collegiate ex-pat fantasy. (This puerile reverie is further filled out within the single set—a small Parisian apartment—by postcards pegged tackily onto the wall, what look like pre-furnished, faux-Arabic throw pillows on a neutral gray couch, and a row of funny little chimneys sprouting off of the roof.) And in perhaps the most devastating example, a guarded cell phone becomes an objective correlative through which issues of miscommunication, betrayal, and manipulation are finally thrown into the intimidating deep end of verbalization. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amy Herzog, Belleville, Gilbert Owuor, Greg Keller, Maria Dizzia, Yale Repertory Theatre
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David Henry Hwang's new Broadway play, Chinglish, begins with an American sign manufacturer talking about his experiences in China, offering his insights about doing business in that country. Just how well he has succeeded in understanding his partners and business practices in a foreign culture becomes clear as the play progresses. The insightful and witty comedy, written in both English and Mandarin (translated very effectively with subtitles projected onto the set) is the latest from the author of the 1988 Tony and Drama Desk award-winning play M. Butterfly, and is currently playing at the Longacre Theater. Chinglish offers a lively and thought-provoking look at a cross-cultural exchange that is likely to continue to figure prominently in the first half of this century.
Hwang made his mark as a playwright with FOB (an Asian-American derogative term for new immigrants who arrive in in the U.S. "Fresh Off the Boat" from Asia) which was produced in New York at the Public Theater in 1980. In the intervening years, the California-born playwright, now 54, has become one of the preeminent Asian-American voices in the theater. He achieved international recognition with M. Butterfly, which is loosely based on a true story about a French diplomat who fell in love with a Peking Opera star, who also happened to be a Chinese government spy, allegedly without realizing that "she" was really a man. In addition to his plays, Hwang work includes librettos for music theater works by Philip Glass, several screenplays and the books for the Disney musicals Aida and Tarzan. He was nominated for a Tony in 1998 for his second play on Broadway, Golden Child, which is inspired by stories about his ancestors related to him by his Chinese maternal grandmother. After a decade's absence, he returned to the New York stage in 2007 with Yellow Face, a comedy in which he examined his own evolving feelings regarding the controversy in the early nineties caused by the casting of a Caucasian actor as the male lead in Miss Saigon. The Obie-winning play, also a finalist that year for the Pulitzer, was staged at the Public Theater under the direction of Leigh Silverman, who also directed Chinglish. Hwang talked recently to The House Next Door about his new work. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aida, Candace Chong, Chinglish, David Henry Hwang, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, FOB, Glengarry Glen Ross, Golden Child, Leigh Silverman, Longacre Theater, M. Butterfly, Miss Saigon, Philip Glass, Public Theater, Pulitzer Prize, Tarzan, Tsai Chin, Yellow Face
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by Carl Kelsch on October 13th, 2011 at 9:49 am in Theater
Every Halloween season, a handful of boutique haunted houses turn shuttered storefronts into temporary funhouses for giddy friends looking for an unusual night out—and willing to fork over around $30 and up for a ticket. Blackout Haunted House, situated on a drab block in midtown, is not that night out.
If fear were a drug, Blackout would rate as some pharmaceutical-grade stuff. The producers have been tinkering with volatile ingredients over the past few years, trying each October to concoct the perfect recipe of shocks to rattle even the most jaded New Yorker.
The first scare is the daunting waiver you're required to sign upon arrival. Patrons are also presented with a list of rules that rivals those of Fight Club. The first rule: "You must walk through alone."
"If you want, you can leave your glasses here," suggested one of hosts as I waited my turn to enter through a slit in a black plastic tarp. It was hard to imagine why my spectacles would pose a problem. Surely they accommodate for eyewear! Continue Reading »
Tags: Blackout Haunted House, David Fincher, Fight Club, Hostel, The Game
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Cabaret, drag, and performance artist, Joey Arias is a potent experience all by himself. Add a Twist—that's master puppeteer Basil Twist—to the mix and you get the heady enchantment that is Arias with a Twist. Arias and Twist's striking collaboration is now playing on the Lower East Side at the Abrons Arts Center, in a nearly century-old theater, the original venue of the Neighborhood Playhouse. It seems fitting that the delightfully zany, visually jaw-dropping, ribald fantasy has berthed at the theater that, in the 1920s, was home to the popular vaudeville spoof, The Grand Street Follies. The current grand folly, Arias with a Twist (playing through October 16) is a series of tableaus, sketches, songs, and theatrical effects strung together to showcase the unique talents of its star and designer.
Arias with a Twist Deluxe, as it is now billed, is a return engagement of the show that became a cult favorite during its eight-month-long run at Soho's HERE theater in 2008, scaled up to fit into a larger stage. Enhanced with a couple of new songs and more elaborate video effects, it still retains the joyously scrappy quality of the original, and continues to surprise and delight with its theatrical magic. Arias, dressed in costumes by Thierry Mugler, holds his own amid Twist's stage creations, which are ably manipulated by a near invisible team of six puppeteers. The very loose plot has the sexually polymorphous character Joey abducted by aliens, duly probed and then dropped back into a lush jungle on this planet; after a mushroom-induced side trip to Hell, a larger-than-life Joey returns to Manhattan to perform in a retro nightclub accompanied by a four-piece puppet orchestra; the act comes complete with a chorus line and a Busby Berkley-inspired finale. Continue Reading »
Tags: Abrons Arts Center, Alex Gifford, Ann Magnuson, Arias with a Twist, Arias with a Twist Deluxe, Bar d'O, Basil Twist, Billie Holliday, Busby Berkley, Cirque du Soleil, Debbie Harry, Fiorucci, HERE, Jackie 60, Joey Arias, Klaus Nomi, Klaus Sperber, Led Zeppelin, Materials for the Arts, Symphonie Fantastique, The Addams Family, The Grand Street Follies, The Neighborhood Playhouse, The Pee-wee Herman Show, Thierry Mugler, You've Changed, Zumanity
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by Lauren Wissot on September 26th, 2011 at 1:58 pm in Theater
Sprung from the mind of Jeffrey Hatcher, the writer behind the underrated play-turned-film Stage Beauty, the Arizona Theatre Company's 45th-anniversary season opener Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club is a fun theatrical mash-up that drops the characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes realm into an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club. I caught this world premiere helmed by ATC's artistic director David Ira Goldstein at the Temple of Music and Art, the company's cozy home base and a civilized oasis in the heart of downtown Tucson. There isn't a bad seat in the roomy house, and you can peruse the upstairs art gallery or take your time enjoying gourmet food, a glass of wine, or a cup of locally roasted coffee from the adjoining Temple Lounge before the show, then grab a refill and take it into the theater with you—a far cry from the tourist cattle call-feel of leisure-lacking Broadway these days. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arizona Theatre Company, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Hatcher, Remi Sandri, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, Stage Beauty, The Suicide Club
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Nothing is quite what it seems in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Invasion! If audiences at the Play Company's production of this delightfully subversive comedy feel a tad uncomfortable during the performance, well, that's how the playwright likes it. Produced by the Play Company, which focuses on a global program of adventurous new plays, Invasion! received its American debut last winter, garnering for Khemiri a 2011 Village Voice OBIE award for playwriting. A remount of the PlayCo production is currently playing at the Flea Theater in Tribeca.
Prior to Invasion!, Khemiri, a Stockholm native of Tunisian and Swedish parentage, was best known as a prose writer, acclaimed in Sweden for his first novel, One Eye Red in 2003. He received a prize for best Swedish novel for his next book, published in the United States this year under the title Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger. The novel is an inventive linguistic balancing act which relates the story of the life of a Tunisian immigrant in Sweden from frequently contradictory perspectives.
Shifting perspectives and a duplicity of language are also the hallmarks of Invasion!, which marked Khemiri's debut as a playwright. In Khemiri's play, a single word—"Abulkasem"—keeps morphing and changing its meaning, in the process moving some characters forward while ensnaring others in an all too familiar net of fear and paranoia. In seven fast-paced scenes, expertly calibrated by director Erica Schmidt, a versatile cast of four (Francis Benhamou, Nick Choksi, Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, and Bobby Moreno) tackle 19 different roles, change personalities and ethnicity on a dime, and always keep the audience on edge. Aided by a deft English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Invasion! stays funny and playful while touching on contemporary politically charged issues that are anything but light-hearted. We spoke recently with the 32-year-old playwright, who was in New York to attend the remount of Invasion!, which opened a few days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Continue Reading »
Tags: 9/11, Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, Bobby Moreno, Erica Schmidt, Folkteatern, Francis Benhamou, Invasion!, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Lars Norén, Ledig House, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, Nick Choksi, OBIE Awards, One Eye Red, Rachel Willson-Broyles, Stockholm City Theatre, The Flea Theater, The Play Company, The Village Voice, University of Wisconsin, World Trade Center
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With Labor Day, summer vacations, and weekend getaways behind us, it's time again to tune into the city's arts and culture vibe. The House checked out the wide variety of theater offerings for Broadway and beyond this fall and made a few selections to put on your calendar:
New Plays
This season is notable for the number of women playwrights with new plays on Broadway. One of them is 29-year-old Katori Hall, who makes her Broadway debut with The Mountaintop (from September 22 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater). In her fictional account, which takes place in 1968, on the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in her own home town of Memphis, the playwright imagines a late-night encounter between King and a mysterious woman. Movie and television star Samuel L. Jackson plays the great civil rights leader and Angela Bassett the nocturnal visitor. The production is directed by Kenny Leon, who received a Tony nomination last year for directing Fences. Leon also helms the production of Stick Fly (from November 18 at the Cort Theater), which marks the Broadway debut of another African American female playwright, Lydia R. Diamond. Stick Fly is a comedy of manners about an affluent black family spending a summer weekend at their home in Martha's Vineyard.
Adam Rapp is well-known for not pulling his punches, so brace yourself for his latest, Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling (starts September 13 at CSC), a surreal play that promises to "lift the veil on the lives of two wealthy American families" in Connecticut. The Atlantic Theater Company production features a dream cast which includes Christine Lahti, Cotter Smith, Katherine Waterston, and the incomparable Reed Birney. Continue Reading »
Tags: Adam Rapp, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Jay Lerner, Angela Bassett, Ascunsion, Audra McDonald, Burton Lane, Chinglish, David Henry Hwang, David Ives, Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling, Follies, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Dancy, James Goldman, Jesse Eisenberg, Joanna Gleason, Katori Hall, Kim Catrall, Krapp's Last Tape, Lydia R. Diamond, Man and Boy, Maple and Vine, Neighborhood Watch, Noël Coward, Norm Lewis, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Other Desert Cities, Peter Parnell, Private Lives, Rachel Weisz, Samuel L. Jackson, Sons of the Prophet, Stephen Karam, Stephen Sondheim, Stick Fly, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, The Mountaintop, Venus in Fur, We Live Here, Zoe Kazan
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David Greenspan sets the tone for a delightful evening of theater magic by jumping onto a jewel-box stage set at the start of The Patsy. There are no doorways on this set, nor is there a ceiling; it's a three-walled cube tastefully decorated with wallpaper and a few sticks of period furniture and props. In the nonstop 75-minute solo performance that follows, Greenspan resurrects a drawing-room comedy from the 1920s—three acts of family drama, witty banter, and romance, complete with a cast of eight characters. First presented on Broadway in 1925, the play, written by Barry Conners, centers on the Harringtons, a quarrelsome middle-class family. The father is a weary travelling salesman, the mother a social-climbing complainer, the elder daughter has just snagged a rich suitor, and the younger, bookish and disregarded by the others, harbors a secret passion for her sister's former, now discarded, lover. Without ever leaving the stage, Greenspan gleefully impersonates all the characters, which includes the girls' two young beaus and two walk-ons, charting their comings and goings and their emotional ups and downs, and setting the scene as needed by reading occasional stage directions as well.
A multiple OBIE winner and Drama Desk nominee, Greenspan is a frequent and distinctive presence on the New York stage. It's not exactly a surprise to see him turn out a bravura performance. Looking back at some of his career highlights, one doesn't easily forget his over the top Other Mother in Coraline, a musical he co-wrote with composer/lyricist Stephin Merritt; his exquisitely stylized portrayal of the acerbic Harold in the 1996 revival of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band; or the exasperating drag queen who delivers a moving rendition of "Over the Rainbow" on the eve of the Stonewall uprising in Terrence McNally's Some Men. Going even further back in time, you might also recall his one-of-a-kind turn as a neurotic artist obsessively channeling Streisand in the 1992 Public Theater production of his own The Home Show Pieces. No stranger to multiple roles, he has also breezed singlehandedly through his own The Myopia, a 25-character cavalcade extravagantly subtitled "an epic burlesque of tragic proportion," which was revived in January last year. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aristophanes, Barry Conners, Coraline, David Greenspan, Drama Desk Awards, Hello Again, Jack Cummings III, Jonas, Kristina Corcoran Williams, Lysistrata Jones, Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Mart Crowley, OBIE Awards, Over the Rainbow, Public Theater, Some Men, Stephin Merritt, Terrence McNally, The Boys in the Band, The Home Show Pieces, The Myopia, The Patsy, The Royal Family, Transport Group
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Unnatural Acts, a new play at the Classic Stage Company, takes us back to period of intolerance that is hopefully unthinkable today. It focuses on events from nearly a century ago, when, in 1920, a panel of administrators at Harvard University embarked on campus-wide investigation aimed at exposing and then expelling homosexuals in the student body. Triggered by the suicide of a student off-campus, the inquiry resulted in another's on campus a few weeks later, and 14 convictions. All evidence of the so-called "Secret Court" was subsequently covered up and it was not until 80 years later that the transcripts of the unprecedented proceedings came to light when Amit Paley, a student reporter for The Harvard Crimson, stumbled upon a reference to it in the university archives. He gained access to some 500 pages of documents in the buried files and broke the story in 2002. Since then, the story of the gay witch hunt at the Ivy League institution has become the subject of a 2005 book-length study by William Bright, a 2009 movie, Perkins 28, in which Harvard undergraduates reenact the student testimonies, and Veritas, a play by Stan Richardson presented at last year's New York International Fringe Festival. Unnatural Acts, which compellingly portrays the young men whose lives were deeply affected by investigations, is collectively written by members of a new ensemble company Plastic Theatre. Associate artistic director at the CSC, Tony Speciale, who conceived and directed this project, spoke recently with the House about the production. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amit Paley, Amy Lowell, Andrea Lauer, Classic Stage Company, Cyril Wilcox, Donald Clark, Edward Say, Ernest Roberts, Eugene Cummings, Harold Saxon, Harold Saxton, Harvard University, Heather Denyer, Jerry Marsini, Jess Burkle, Joe Curnutte, Keith Smerage, Kenneth Day, Nathaniel Wolff, Nicholas Norman, oseph Lumbard, Perkins 28, Plastic Theatre, Secret Court of 1920, The Harvard Crimson, Tony Speciale, Unnatural Acts, William Bright
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The great Tennessee Williams, unsurpassed poet of the theater and incisive chronicler of the human soul, was born 100 years ago this March. No surprise then that we are likely to see a slew of his work produced on our stages in his centenary year. In New York, we've already had productions of his lesser known Vieux Carré and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Now we have a particularly unusual offering in the New Group and Tectonic Theater Project's production of One Arm, based on an unproduced Williams screenplay. The production, currently playing at Theater Row, is adapted and directed by Moisés Kaufman, who's best known for the plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project, and the Tony-nominated 33 Variations. Kaufman also recently directed Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, currently playing on Broadway. The Venezuelan born director/playwright talked to The House recently about his labor of love, bringing this little known Williams work to the stage.
Gerard Raymond: How did you get interested in One Arm?
Moisés Kaufman: I found it in a collection of screenplays about 10 years ago and I remember being immediately struck by its frankness. When Williams is depicting gay life in the '40s, '50s, or '60s, for obvious reasons, his gay characters always end up very badly: Blanche DuBois's boyfriend commits suicide off-stage [A Streetcar Named Desire], Paul Newman ends up married to Elizabeth Taylor [the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], and in Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian ends up being eaten by cannibals. This screenplay is really about the kind of homosexual underground in which Tennessee Williams lived. The story is based, supposedly, on a hustler, who had one arm, who he knew in New Orleans, who was incredibly beautiful and who resembled the statue of Apollo. Obviously it was autobiographical because he met this hustler, but it was also personal because toward the end of his life most of his sexual encounters were with hustlers. It was the frankest portrayal of that world that I had seen from Williams. I was very moved and very excited by that.
GR: Didn't he write it originally as a short story? Continue Reading »
Tags: 33 Variations, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Constantin Stanislavski, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, Jerzy Grotowski, Moises Kaufman, One Arm, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Tadeusz Kantor, Tectonic Theater Project, Tennessee Williams, The Laramie Project, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The New Group, The Seagull, Tony Awards, Vieux Carré
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If you've never seen the film Through a Glass Darkly, then there's a fighting chance you might like Jenny Worton's stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpiece, the great director's starting point in a trilogy of soul-wrenching 1960s films that tackle God's relationship—or lack thereof—to humanity. But if you have set eyes and ears on Bergman's carefully crafted images and words, then experiencing Worton's ham-fisted take on the original is as emotionally satisfying as reading a Cliffs Notes version of Moby Dick.
Which is not to say that adapting Through a Glass Darkly for the stage was a bad idea; in bringing to the screen what was essentially a psychologically fraught chamber play, Bergman, who also wrote the film, always acknowledged a creative debt to the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. Certainly, taking Bergman's minimal characters and haunting island setting from celluloid to three dimensions was not a ready-made feat, but with some clever tweaking it could have been a worthwhile effort. Unfortunately, however, Worton and director David Leveaux fall far short of worthwhile, instead achieving an undesirable sort of artistic alchemy, where they turn movie gold into theatrical straw. Continue Reading »
Tags: August Strindberg, Ben Rosenfield, Carey Mulligan, Chris Sarandon, Cliffs Notes, David Leveaux, Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, Jason Butler Harner, Jenny Worton, Moby Dick, Through a Glass Darkly
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Developed from their earlier Urbanopolis, which ran at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Subterranea: An Urban Fairytale is the latest production from underappreciated aerial troupe extraordinaire Suspended Cirque. Opening with Joshua Dean's futuristic hobo Pan making small, uh, "talk" (Pan uses nonsense-speak) with the incoming audience, Subterranea can best be described as Dr. Seuss gone cyber. As a synthesized voice welcomes us to our visit to this strange land, Pan helpfully pantomimes the consequences of cell phone use and photography during the performance before the curtains part to reveal three amorphous bundles dangling in midair. Bathed in red lighting against the blackness of the stage, chandeliers crafted from empty, upside-down water bottles hanging from hoops come into focus. As the purple fabric begins to writhe, the cocoons conjure up an Alien creepiness. After slowly unfolding from their aerial wombs, which morph into sturdy strips, a trio of gothic female extraterrestrials (the troupe's tall blonds Angela Jones and Kristin Olness as Prima and Hecate, and its petite brunette Michelle Dortignac as Echo) perform an alluring modern dance in midair. They're trying to entice our protagonist, The Man, played by Suspended Cirque's lanky vaudevillian straight man Ben Franklin, who has just descended—via a white fabric strip—into their dark underworld. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Oswald, Angela Jones, Ben Franklin, Connelly Theater, DUMBO, Galapagos Art Space, Joshua Dean, Kristin Olness, Lani Corson, Megan Loomis, Michelle Dortignac, Subterranea: An Urban Fairytale, Suspended Cirque, Urbanopolis
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by Ed Gonzalez on April 27th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
Following showings of the new Broadway revival of The Normal Heart, audiences are handed a letter written by the play's author, Larry Kramer. Titled "Please Know," this epistle is, like the play itself, a provocation—a cutting indictment of the bureaucratic greed, political self-interest, and apathy within the gay community that continues to stand in the way of AIDS research and education. Why is The Normal Heart still relevant? Because Kramer, in his own words, has "never seen such wrongs as this plague, in all its guises, represents, and continues to say about us all."
The subject of this remarkable play isn't only AIDS and what it says about us all, from gays and our friends to politicos and Big Pharma; like Kramer's brilliant Faggots, a hilarious, fiercely intelligent, stinging, heartbreaking account of gay life in post-Stonewall New York City, it's also about Kramer's brutalizing anger and how he righteously turned it into a call to action. The play's lead, writer and activist Ned Weeks, is a stand-in for Kramer, just as the nameless organization he founds, and from which he's removed on the eve of finally getting face time with the city's mayor, is the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He isn't the play's hero exactly, but his volcanic, justified rage is very much heroic, and it fuels the text's most devastating, customarily articulate, takedowns of the people and organizations—Koch, Reagan, The New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control, even the very gays Faggots helped to liberate—that allowed AIDS to happen. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brad Davis, Centers of Disease Control, Ed Koch, Ellen Barkin, Faggots, Gay Men's Health Crisis, George C. Wolfe, Jim Parsons, Joe Mantello, Joel Grey, John Benjamin Hickey, Larry Kramer, Lee Pace, Luke MacFarlane, Ronald Reagan, The New York Times, The Normal Heart
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Though The Little Chaos takes its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1966 short, it's primarily a deconstruction of the director's first feature, the deconstructionist Love Is Colder Than Death. Using text not only from Fassbinder's films, but also from Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, even a postmodernist novel called The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme, the play is a heady Brechtian mashup that surprisingly charms rather than ironically alienates. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brock Harris, Donald Barthelme, Enver Chakartash, Hanna Schygulla, Jim Jarmusch, Love Is Colder Than Death, Raimonda Skeryte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ronald Peet, Stiven Luka, Stranger Than Paradise, The Dead Father, The Little Chaos, Ulli Lommel, William Moody
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by Carl Kelsch on April 14th, 2011 at 3:24 pm in Theater
One of the season's biggest theatrical spectacles is not on Broadway. Sleep No More marks the New York City debut of Punchdrunk, a British company known for its immersive theater productions. Filling up a six-floor Chelsea warehouse space with their heady concoction of scenic design and wordless performance, they've managed to turn Macbeth inside out. "The Scottish play" is certainly having a New York moment: two Off-Broadway productions, Throne of Blood at Film Forum this weekend. Punchdrunk's loose adaptation ups the ante, making the audience uniquely complicit in this tale of madness, upheaval, and revenge.
While "interactive" performances like Fuerza Bruta take their inspiration from the club scene, Punchdrunk has adopted the atmosphere of a haunted house—or in this case, a hotel. They've replaced cheap scares with the genuine ghastliness of the source material, Shakespeare's most macabre play. Sleep No More's primary setting is the McKittrick Hotel. With its noirish early-1930s trappings, this hotel functions as a time warp as well. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Alli Ross, Eric Jackson Bradley, Fuerza Bruta, Macbeth, Punchdrunk, Rebecca, Sleep No More, Suspicion, Tori Sparks, William Shakespeare
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