For this newsletter: two plays in eerie conversation with one another, both available to watch in person in NYC or online wherever you happen to be.
🧑💻 + 🚶🏽 AND COME APART by Eric Marlin, directed by Lila Rachel Becker
presented by The Tank and Portmanteau as part of DarkFest
I promise I didn't start this newsletter to plug my own work, so I ask you suspend your disbelief for a moment and please think of this as plugging the work of the other 12 people who created this show, because damn, they are good.
The sun is going down. Shabbat is almost over. You - the matriarch of a family who has left the Forest, crossed the Desert, and made a life in this New Place - you are now in your twilight hours. No longer able to see or speak, your three daughters have returned home to keep vigil by your side. As they dredge up History, warping time, space, and language around you, your only hope for peace may be your granddaughter, the one person who seems to notice you’re still there. An experiment in radical empathy, and come apart compresses a thousand years of Jewish diaspora history into a single generation to examine the violence assimilation yields, the false promise of America, and the rituals through which we might begin to heal.
The tale of this play is interesting one. Eric wrote it with a blindfolded audience in mind, and so when the pandemic began, we thought it would be a relatively straightforward pivot to covid-safe theatre. After all, the intention is that the audience is in the position of the dying matriarch, robbed of visual stimuli. One year later, lesson learned: creating theatre designed to be experienced remotely is anything but straightforward. We rehearsed and recorded the entire play remotely in just two weeks! Art Director Alahna Watson custom rebuilt Portmanteau's website to house the play! There were hours and hours of audio for Phil Johnson, Avi Amon, Eric, and I to sort through and edit and design and mix! I’ve now got a real appreciation of the precision involved in any kind of art that is recorded. By virtue of its liveness, theatre is, in its bones, inexact.
There are two different versions of and come apart: one in-person and one online. They share a lot, but are definitely different experiences. The in-person show is designed as a communal experience, capitalizing upon the miracle of being able to be together (masked and vaccinated) in the same room again. The at-home show was designed at the height of the pandemic to help people feel connected to something larger while they tuned in alone from their homes. I'm dying for some audience members to go to both, because I'm so curious about the differences that people will experience. (If this is you, write me!)
tl;dr However you take in and come apart, it's a gut-wrenchingly beautiful play that feels just right at this moment in the pandemic: cautiously hopeful about the future while working thoughtfully through the trauma of the past, all with a good sense of humor. I'm so proud to share it with you.
🧑💻 watch online on-demand
💰 pay-what-you-want tickets here for $20-$75
🗓 through August 22
~ OR ~
🚶🏽watch in person at The Tank
💰 pay-what-you-want tickets here for $15-$75
❗️ through August 7
💉 must show proof of vaccination and wear a mask for the whole show
🧑💻 + 🚶🏽 SAMUEL by Alexis Roblan, directed by Dara Malina
presented by The Tank + Alexis Roblan
If and come apart sounds like your kind of thing, then so is Samuel. In a very strange coincidence, both plays are running concurrently at The Tank and online, both delve into family trauma and memory, and both feature the wonderful actor Lori Elizabeth Parquet!
Samuel has a virtual version that you can listen to at home, but I want to focus on the production at The Tank, which pairs a series of gorgeous, unsettling dollhouse dioramas with the audio of the play. (Headphones are available if you don't have your own.) Audience members download the shows on their phones and listen individually as they move through different spaces at The Tank.
The lighting by Kate McGee, visual design by You-Shin Chen, and installations by Ant Ma and Nina Pan all create a surreal experience of being a giant voyeuristically looking in upon disturbing scenes of human families. Each of the 9 episodes of the play has a different diorama. They don't so much illustrate the scenes as provide an emotional aura for the space that you're listening in to. The different rhythms of the visuals and audio created an uncanny feeling of dread, and I appreciated how fully immersed I felt even with no actors present. Each diorama was intricate and beautiful and I happily examined all of the tiny details over the course of the episode I was listening to.
tl;dr More plays with tiny dollhouse furniture and props! See Samuel if you’re into spook, family drama, going through antique stores to find particularly haunted items, and sneaking peeks into people’s windows at night when their lights are on.
🧑💻 watch online anywhere, anytime
💰 tickets here for $15
~ OR ~
🚶🏽watch in person
💰 tickets here for $25
❗️ through August 14
💉 must show proof of vaccination and wear a mask for the whole show
Stay tuned for the next newsletter, where I will cover…Broadway?!