Interludes

VIEWPOINT – A million ways to tell a story: A recap of UNDER THE RADAR 2023

• By drediman
• January 24, 2023
• No Comments

There are a million ways to tell a story – just ask the folks behind Under the Radar. Returning with a vengeance this January after two years on hiatus, the Public Theater’s 2023 iteration of its indispensable experimental theater festival does what it has always done best – that is, to push the limits of what constitutes theater. Over the course of roughly two weeks, I immersed myself in no less than 16 of the festival’s offerings, which were performed at various spaces at the Public’s home base on Lafayette Street, in addition to other venues across the city (e.g., NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, Chelsea Factory, NY Public Library). Here are my thoughts on the invariably wild ride that is Under the Radar.

Cabaret Confessionals

At this year’s festival, there was a prolific lineup at Joe’s Pub. Using the cabaret genre as a springboard for candid storytelling, these “cabaret confessionals” exposed Under the Radar audiences to a number of autobiographical tales – with a good deal of music and “anything goes” spirit – intimately told by some of the downtown scene’s longtime denizens. First case in point was Julian Fleisher’s fast-and-loose and very entertaining show (entitled, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, simply as Under the Radar), which recounts his childhood as a gay Jewish boy in Baltimore and his journey to New York and the world of entertainment. Backed by a relatively large band, Fleisher crooned and spontaneously bantered his way through a crowd-pleasing set that left the Joe’s Pub audience on a high. Then there was Estzer Balint in her coming-of-age cabaret act I Hate Memory. Co-created by Stew (of Passing Strange fame) and directed by Lucy Sexton, the evening was a fond if labored look back at her formative days as a radical youth on the storied streets of the Lower East Side of the 1970s and 1980s. Finally there’s Migguel Anggelo’s feisty autobiographical concoction LatinXoxo. Born the child of conservative Venezuelan parents, Anggelo’s fanciful show chronicles his difficult evolution into a sassy queer entertainer, defiantly challenging gender expectations every step of the way. Directed with theatrical panache by Adrian Alexander Alea, LatinoXoxo calls to mind shows such unclassifiable conceptual experiences as John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Uniquely Immersive Experiences

In many instances, Under the Radar provided a number of uniquely immersive experiences that invited audiences to step into the minds of the artists onstage. Particularly immersive were a trio of shows that encouraged audiences to break the fourth wall and enter the world of the theater artists’ imagination. Earlier on in my adventures, I came upon The Indigo Room at La MaMa. Created by Timothy White Eagle (who also stars in the piece) and The Violet Triangle, the experience took audiences from the bright colored lights of a carnival to the quiet bowels of a metaphorical whale, where our spiritual guide casted a spell through ritual and involved storytelling. Then uptown at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library location, I immersed myself in A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly, the final installment of the ever-adventurous 600 Highwaymen’s trilogy of work imploring participants to look within themselves and to each other to create community-based theater amongst themselves. Very much like The Indigo Room, the piece – like its two predecessors – asks audiences to dig deep and think critically and reflectively about what it means to emerge from the dark days of the pandemic. Finally, there’s the fascinatingly-titled and designed seven methods of killing kylie jenner by Jasmine Lee-Jones. The play was previously seen at London’s prestigious Royal Court Theatre and is being presented at Under the Radar in association with Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Although I found its furious investigation of Black queer identity undeniably provocative and spiky, I was ultimately left numb by its relentless barrage of aggressive comparisons to the popular culture icon.

Mining Great Literary works of the Past to Inform the Present

To make sense of our fast changing world, many of the theater artists at this year’s festival looked to the past, particularly with respect to work literature. Perhaps the most inspired of the bunch was Salty Brine in Bigmouth Strikes Again: The Smiths Show. An entry in the entertainer’s The Living Record Collection, Ms. Brine’s lively cabaret show at Joe’s Pub improbably channeled Frankenstein, the life of its author Mary Shelley, and The Smiths catalogue of songs. The result was a supremely smart, hugely entertaining tapestry that worked despite its vastly disparate references. On the other end of the spectrum was Otto Frank, Roger Guenveur Smith and sound designer Marc Anthony Thompson’s pungent excavation of Anne Frank’s post-humous legacy from the perspective of her father (who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust). Both overwhelming and overwrought, the solo show was performed with deliberate melancholy and heightened emotion by Mr. Smith. A bit less substantial yet audaciously entertaining – and crude – was Your Sexts are Shit: Older Better Letters. Written and performed with deadpan glee by Rachel Mars, the show lived up to its title by hilariously juxtaposing graphic yet eloquent sex letters exchanged by artistic giants (the ones penned by James Joyce to his liver were spectacularly raunchy) with the blunt, clumsy “sext” messages of today. Then there’s Our Country, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s riff on Sophocles’ Antigone, the American Western genre, and Saunders’ own turbulent relationship with her brother (sensationally played by Jesse Saler). It’s a sophisticated piece of theater that melded its influences to incite layered thought and reflection. Lastly, over at La MaMa, Ahmed Moneka, Jesse LaVercombe, and Seth Bockley’s King Gilgamesh & the Man of the Wild told the parallel stories that intersected myth and modern day-to-day life. A tad overlong, the TRIA Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre production only came truly alive when it leaned into its segments of rollicking music-making.

Other Forms: Puppetry, Film, and Stand-up Comedy

Beyond cabaret and traditional theater vernacular, Under the Radar 2023 also dabbled in other genres of performance. A prime case in point was Plexus Polaire’s theatrical adaptation of the literary masterspiece Moby Dick. Directed by Yngvild Aspeli, the stylish staging utilized breathtaking puppetry to tell Herman Melville’s well-known tale of obsession and madness. Then over at BAM Rose Cinemas, film was the medium of choice for Back to Back Pictures’ Shadow, itself a cinematic adaptation of the play The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes (the Back to Back Theatre production on which it’s based was actually seen in New York during the 2019 edition of Under the Radar). At just under an hour, the film (and play) have given people with disabilities the exceedingly rare opportunity to take ownership of their own artistic expression. The result is both provocative and somewhat disorienting, altogether a surprisingly nuanced exercise in storytelling and character building. Back at Joe’s Pub, the festival also placed traditional stand-up comedy up front and center with its presentation of Negin Far-sad in The Case For American Exceptionalism By a Lady Muz. Identifying as an Iranian-American Muslim with a Black husband, Ms. Far-sad uses whip-smart, occasionally self-deprecating humor to call attention less visible/represented faces of our society.

The Larger Picture

Then we have pieces that take a step back and contemplate humanity’s place in the larger scheme of things. First up at BAM was Ontroerend Goed’s
Are we not drawn onward to new erA, a conceptual piece of theater that asked audiences at BAM Fisher to imagine if reversing time were possible. At the same time, however, director Alexander Devriendt makes it clear that hindsight is 20/20. As his production travels forwards and backwards through millions of years, one is given a hopeful glimpse of the world we could have had had we the wherewithal to maintained our fragile world. Ultimately, the piece registers like an impossible dream that one occasionally awakes from – immediately after the lights go up, we get the sinking feeling that our natural world is going down an irreversible path. Another cosmically-interested piece was New York City Players’ production of Field of Mars at NYU Skirball. Written and directed by Richard Maxwell (the company’s founder and artistic director, and one of the most distinctive and polarizing voices in working in New York theater). Utilizing the playwright’s trademark austerity and deadpan – some may say flat – delivery, his company of actors embark on nothing less than the history of human civilization (notions of religion, art, and evolution are stealthily weaved into the piece). Despite its formal experimentalism (this is Under the Radar, after all) and the chilliness it evokes, I ultimately found Field of Mars to be an oddly compelling work that insistently makes the case for the sacred within the mundane, and vice-versa.