Spring has officially sprung. In New York, pashmina scarves and bootleg pants have been replaced by sandals and cropped Capris. With the first cold winter in years finally over, an exodus of New Yorkers fleeing the city for country air could seem likely. But something Oscar Wilde wrote over a 100 years ago seems more prescient of New York’s appeal: “Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out…Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.” In the competition to lure theatergoers away from the allergy-rich bucolic settings and into their seats in the city, Off-Off Broadway theaters are once again showing some determination. Their own notion of spirited protest follows.
The wily charms of vaudeville get reincarnated in a new play by C.J. Hopkins called A Place Like This produced by The Present Company at their Theatorium on Stanton Street. “It’s so strong, beautiful, and ritualistic and anyone–a Wall St. guy or a person who works in a bakery–can relate to the play,”
to the Perverted at P.S. 122
says artistic director John Clancy. “The play talks about the un-nameable, the values we all have, that consciousness, and it’s altogether funny and engaging.” The show opens in late May.
Some blocks north on First Avenue, Holly Hughes returns to P.S. 122 with Preaching to the Perverted, a show she developed last year at Dixon Place. Hughes, one of the four performance artists whose funds the NEA took back for “reasons of propriety” back in the early 90s, is preaching about the U.S. Supreme Court and the 92nd St. Y. The perverted (and others) can catch Holly at P.S. 122 from late April to late May. Starting April 13 at the venerable avant-garde space, Stefa Zawerucha and David Fritz use light and the work of some of the foremost lighting designers to create an unusual dance piece. Fractured Light runs for ten days; performances with briefer runs at P.S. 122 this spring include Maura Nguyen Donohue accompanied by “righteous babes,” Tanya Gagne and Karen Sherman in a girl gang/action movie play, and David Neumann using Appalachian square dances to explore performance.
Over on East 4th Street, La MaMa’s plans don’t even so much as nod to the changing weather. Ritualistic Greek performance art, accompanied by a five-piece orchestra, The Dream of the Phoenix, takes place in mid-April. And a re-staging of its 1989 production of The Night Before Thinking, a play by Moroccan painter Ahmed Yacoubi scheduled for later in April, shows the breadth of the theater’s appetite–the event includes: North African music performed by a live orchestra, projections of Yacoubi’s paintings, the plumage of many costumes, and dance.
Multimedia makes another showing at La MaMa in late April to mid May with the opera The Valley of Iao by Lee Nagrin. The piece explores the relationship between Nagrin and her brother, with the sets telling as much of the story as the play. Later in May, Denise Stoklos, the “Meryl Streep of Brazil”, continues the international spring flavor in her newest biographical work.
La MaMa is also producing What Happened to Me?, a play with many characters which tells the story of a homeless man. For those who like Patricia Highsmith novels, Edgar Oliver’s The Drowning Pages–which press representative Jonathan Slaff describes as “a new psycho-sexual poetry play”–should delight, as should the musical The Wound, going up in late May, which concerns the cruel acts of an innkeeper named Maria.
Over on lower Sixth Avenue at HERE, also in May, Kay Ostrenko will perform her one-woman show about her unusual Florida childhood and how consciousness of her race (white) didn’t set in until high school. Also at HERE, running through April, Renée Flemings stars in The Bible Belt, a one-woman show about religion, redemption and hair grease in that region of the country.
