I Dreamed of Rats (play)

Terrence Cranendonk
"I Dreamed of Rats"

For the past several years, artists have been leaning on the boundaries of live performance by creating interactive or intimate theatrical events, plays where the audience either has a (sometimes very limited) choice in the manner in which they observe or engage with the performance, or are made part of the performance itself in some creative fashion.

One of the most recent, much-ballyhooed productions in 2011 has been the arrival in New York City of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, in which an entire hotel is the setting for a remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Emphasis is placed little on the text, and more on the mood and atmosphere. Audience members wear masks, watching as actors murder, party and have sex right in front of them -- and the audience is permitted to get as close to the action as they like (so long as they don’t touch anyone.) One review noted how audience members would pick up things to look at them, like discarded letters, or rummage through cabinets or cases, and discover something relevant everywhere they did.

Over ten years ago I heard of the Neo-Futurists staging their version of Crime and Punishment, where every participant (audience member?) was handed a portable cassette tape player -- like I said, over ten years ago -- and had to follow whatever instructions were given them through their headphones. Which room to walk to next, whether to act as accused or judge. Each audience member went in on their own, though they may find themselves in a room with another audience member, whom they most likely did not know, playing their part in that moment’s scenario.

Nick Denny & I
"Voice In Head"

Nick, my brother Denny and I joined the audience of Voice-In-Head at the Theatre Garage during the 2003 Minnesota Fringe which followed the same model only with absurdist results. We had minidisc players (things change) and were given instructions to carry out throughout the proceedings. My brother told a surprisingly funny joke, considering he is very bad at telling stories, and Nick apparently had two minutes to tell the audience anything he wanted, and chose to praise me and my overwhelming talent and general goodness, and that if everyone that night saw just one more show the the Minnesota Fringe, it had better be I Hate This, which was opening the next evening.

 
I didn’t hear any of this, my brother asked me later if that embarrassed me or if I was moved or anything because I had this frozen mask on my face the entire time Nick was lauding my glory. I had to admit that for the entire two minutes this was going on I was receiving complicated instructions about how it was soon necessary for me to leap up, swirl around the room and deliver the worst fake-Shakespearean monologue I could muster.

Even more recently, the concept of salon performances have swept the theater world. Not simply the type of play where actors perform for an audience of one (although that is also a big deal deal right now) but situations where an actor or small company holds a performance in their own home.

The first I became aware of such an idea was in the early 90s when I first learned of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which he introduced to select audiences in an apartment near Seventh Avenue. Wow. That’s exclusive, I thought. I wonder who was there. Given the opportunity to experience such a thing, I would not pass it up. Strange that I never had the nerve to do it myself.

Because really, I feel there is an emotional leap required to attempt such a thing, even now that it has become en vogue. And it has to be artistically requisite. A solo performance, sure, but that seems arrogant in the extreme. I have thrown a party where you have to sit quietly while I talk about me for an hour. A narcissist’s wet dream.

Last year I attended a performance of Kirk Wood Bromley’s It Was a Setup … performed for an audience of 20 in his living room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was an open, advertised performance, but only if you had a reservation would you receive the address. A play for three, a domestic drama, it was perfectly suited to the realist, well, real space and the confined proximity to the performers.

Yes, it took me twenty years to find and attend a salon performance.

A few weeks back my wife and received a Facebook invitation to Terence Cranendonk’s I Dreamed of Rats. Terry has been working on this piece for over fifteen years, a one-hour, solo adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General. We attended last night, arriving just in time, at his lovely home in Akron, and joined an audience of eight for a startlingly good event. Terry has always been a member of the physical theater, and he is a joy to watch in performance. Surprise is humor, and his work consistently leaves me surprised and delighted.

And, as most nourishing artistic experiences do, last night’s event left me hungry, wondering what I will do next to fill it.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Two Very New York Performances

Magdalyn Donnelly, Jeffery Querin
"My Name Is Ruth"
34West Productions (2010)

Incredible. Last night and this afternoon I caught two plays which could not have stood in greater contrast to each other as re: how two people can behave in a relationship.

It Was A Set Up, written by Kirk Wood Bromley in collaboration with Leah Schrager was performed in a Brooklyn living room by two extremely driven, high-intensity performers exploring a relationship in total free-fall. The husband, Tim (played by a guy named Tim) a 30ish artist of questionable professional ambition and his writerly wife Charise (played by Charise) have ceased to communicate - I mean, they communicate, all the time, their hearts and desires are on their sleeves, their faces, their everything, holding nothing back only it has been a long time since either of them have been able to provide the other with anything they want.

Only I don’t think that’s fair to her. I see him no longer interested in her and her being understandably angry because this isn’t what she asked for. Making matters worse is his one-night, flirtatious but otherwise non-actually-fucking encounter with a woman ten years his junior named Juliet (played by - wait for it - a woman named Lucy, who I found an incredibly watchable dancer.) The introduction of the presence of the memory of this woman makes what was merely a dysfunction relationship now non-functional.

She says, “Look at me,” and he says, “All I see is Juiet.” Actually, they never say those exact words, they say words much more inspired. But that’s what they mean.

Witnessing the sad disillusion of a once loving (?) partnership, with a glass of whiskey in your red, plastic tumbler (ice slowly melting, neglected) in an actual living room, right in your face, as they say, was not merely some theatrical trick. It was something I want to have happen again.

This afternoon I watched the Magdalyn, whom I adore, inhabit the Ruth in My Name Is Ruth, an unflinchingly sweet, mid-20th century retelling of, well, The Book of Ruth. Props to the other actor in the production and co-creator of the show Jeffery Querin (sorry I had to run guy, I wanted to shake hands!) who moved into and out of a number or supporting characters, including Ruth’s befuddled, sweaty, painfully adorable romantic interest Boaz.

I have seen Magdalyn play bloodthirtsy Lady Macbeth in close, urban classrooms. I have directed her as both the plotting, Lady Macbeth-like Peggy Shippen and the goofy, pint-sized Lord Cornwallis in Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution. I have worked alongside her performing Neo-Futurist plays in the scene shop of CPT for an audience of ten, crammed into a freight elevator. I do not believe I have seen Magdalyn play a character who at once is as earnest, unironic, rock-steady and true, and yet pulls it all off with a silly Minnesotan accent. Magdalyn Donnelly iz tha beez neez.

It Was A Setup, in its inaugural run, closed last night. My Name Is Ruth, in its New York premiere, opened this afternoon. And I got to see both. I love live theater!

UPDATE: "My Name is Ruth" by Stephen W. Baldwin received an award for Overall Excellence in Playwriting at the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival

Not missing the Fringe.

Planning as I was to return to NYC in August to catch Bromley’s show (more on that later) I was worried I would get all angsty about not participating - or ever seeing any shows in - the NY Fringe. Why does the Fringe, this Fringe matter? Force of habit, I suppose. I have been disappointed with it at times, but mostly my thoughts of it (watching in 2000, participating in 2001, 2004, 2009) have been very positive.

One thing I was concerned about was having a big freak-out yesterday, throwing over my planned afternoon and seeing some shows … shows I would inevitably find disappointing (because things never go as planned) and fret about wasting time. Never fear, I was a good boy. And I saw a show Friday night, which I have grown more content with over the past day and a half for what it instilled in me, and I will see another in forty-five minutes. For as I blog, I am sitting in the lobby of the Connelly Theatre on East 4th between A & B waiting to see My Name Is Ruth, featuring none other but my former co-worker and friend Magdalyn Donnelly in what I believe is her New York debut. Could be wrong about that, I will know more once I have opened a program.

I am not missing the Fringe. And I am not missing the Fringe. Get it? Called a car to pick me up right after curtain, to whisk me to LaGuardia. Good weekend! Thank you.

It Was A Setup

When I was last in New York I had the unique opportunity to drop in on the rehearsal of a new work written by a playwright I admire. In 2004 I directed The American Revolution by Kirk Wood Bromley, artistic director and playwright-in-residence for Inverse Theater. He specializes in modern verse plays, often creating five-act compositions in iambic pentameter. This most recent piece, It Was A Setup is a brief, personal piece of work, and one I have made plans to see when it debuts next month.

I contacted Bromley earlier in the year — I hadn’t spoken with him since our production of AM REV. At that time, I was delighted when he and a number of his crew journeyed to Cleveland to witness the production. A few months ago I asked if he had anything in the works, and he let me in on this new work. I read the script a few days before visiting in late June, and joined him and the company at his place in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn for the rehearsal.

It Was a Setup is a three-person play, inspired in part by the work of Bromley’s collaborator in this project, Leah Schraeger. She creates “phoems” — or photograph poems. She is also the choreographer for this piece. The script does not consist of realistic dialogue, but the rather the honest, emotional expression of a relationship is crisis. It is poetic, satiric, acidic, forlorn, angry, hilarious … but upon first read I have to admit I had no idea how one could stage it.

The night in question I was privileged to witness the most challenging scene of the piece, the least “obvious” of the scenes, where it was not clear to me, reading the script, exactly what was happening. It was fascinating, having this opportunity to watch and listen as the director-playwright explained, negotiated, and shaped the intentions and action of these three performers. Having the chance to watch a rehearsal as an entirely disconnected observer, with nothing at stake as writer, director, performer or designer was truly a unique opportunity, and I am extremely grateful all of the artists involved allowed me to be there.

It was, I felt, a very successful night. There appeared to be a great deal at stake, and after an extremely swift three-hours, these disjointed thoughts had the semblance of a through-line that could be carried forward into the next rehearsal. In brief, Charise and Tim have a relationship which has stalled, and is put into crisis by the appearance of a third character, Juliet. In this scene she is not actually there, but she is, if you follow. This is a sensation which is not unfamiliar to me.

The performance is scheduled to take place in an equally intimate space, identical to the one in which they rehearsed (location to be announced only when you purchase tickets — sweet.) The close proximity of the performers gives the piece an uncomfortable intensity. I cannot imagine how it will feel with twenty other audience members present — for that is all the space will hold.

Today we finalized my plans to return to NYC two weeks from tomorrow, in addition to attending this production I hope to revisit the Performing Arts Library, and maybe even check out the shows at the New York Fringe Festival.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign!