Criticultura em Portugal

Imagine your first day at college. You wander among unfamiliar buildings, trying to find your classroom. Once found, you calculatingly choose a seat and try to divine who your classmates are from their dress, body language, and verbal/nonverbal behavior. Who is hot? Who seems like one to avoid? All this was my actual experience in arriving at  The Sensuality Play , a remarkable experience presented by The New Group and written by the young playwright Justin Kuritzkes. The structure was daring...6 actors scattered among 7 audience members in a circle of chairs, sans props, conventional stage effects, or costumes, all in a normal classroom at of one of several NYC colleges (I attended at Lehman College in the Bronx, in what appeared to be a dance rehearsal room, bare of furniture except for the chairs). Who around you was an actor, who was in the audience? (only clue--the actors did not have programs) The play began with the remarkable (presence, eyes) Jake Horowitz sauntering in, sitti

For non New Yorkers, the Armory is a large performance space in Manhattan, originally used in the 19th C for storing munitions/weapons, now used as a BIG space for arts productions. For example, when I saw  Macbeth  there a couple years ago, an entire gladitorial arena was set up inside, and you entered through foggy moors. In March I saw Die Materie , a 4 act opera/tone poem/? by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Unlike some of the new agey-spiritual spectacles, this one did not come off as one bad LSD trip, at least not always. While there were episodes of un-spiritual stasis, it was an overall fascinating thing to see (see picture of 200 sheep on stage, e.g.) The music was sometimes interesting, occasionally too repetitive without enough forward motion. Movement 1 was about man's technology-- lots of rhythm, pounding chords (exactly 144 to start), Bachian math ratios, symbolic portrayal of the founding of Holland via shipbuilding, zeppelins overhead. Movement 2 was adagio, s

The Red Speedo, a play about performance enhancing drugs and the pressures of the high performance athlete, is most striking before a single word is spoken. I was seated in row 2, 3 feet behind a long 1.5 m tall, 1m deep translucent "fishtank" that extended the width of the stage. Actor Alex Breaux enters clad only in a red Speedo, dives into the chlorinated tank, and does a few laps with flip turns before toweling off. This Speedo will be his only attire for the rest of the play. A memorable opening! As for the talking, there are few characters, and few new insights if you read the papers about PEDs in sports. The athlete is manipulated for profit and fame, and appears cluelessly focused on his times, like most high level competitors for whom times/winning are the sole metrics of success. Playwright Lucas Hnath does a good job of moving things along and not preaching, thankfully. I did appreciate the complexity built into the story as the swimmer himself manipulates and

Immersive theater, in which attendees wander around a space and have individualized experiences with actors, is all the rage. I attended a well-reviewed example of this on a chilly night in Brooklyn. Then She Fell was created by the Third Rail Project based on writings of Lewis Carroll. It opened last year in an abandoned hospital, and recently moved to an old Brooklyn church. Only 15 "audience" members are admitted each night, and there are 6-7 dancers and actors who perform the various 15 or so scenarios in different rooms and floors of the church. You are artfully guided around, sometimes alone, sometimes with others (6 at most), usually watching, but sometimes interacting (shadowing the actions of a mime through a "mirror", dealing cards e.g.). Nothing is terribly risky, though. I need to respond to this on two levels. First, the experience  was stimulating, fun, and new. It reminded me of a very professional version of the walk thru haunted houses a friend of

The Unrepeatable Moment, a set of six short plays by John Yearley presented by The Barrow Group, was a provocative evening of theater. The plays were not written as a set, but when packaged together, presented a touching panorama of companionship, love, and loneliness. Most settings were in New York or similar urban settings. The plays were 1-2 character affairs, and all the actors were good, some extraordinary. Most memorable was "Horrible Person that I am", a monologue (Tricia Alexandro) of a lonely urban woman stood up on her last date and reaching the limits of her loneliness (through a brash NY veneer). The finale "A Low Lying Fog" was also memorable, with convincing interactions among brothers about, life and an automobile accident. Turns out one of them is actually dead, and the "Ghost"-like scenario works really well without gimmickry. The small theater and fine, intense acting made me grateful to live in a theater mecca. The depth of acting talent