Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Experimental theater is alive and well: PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE at HERE and PROMETHEUS FIREBRINGER at TFANA

• By drediman
• September 30, 2023
• No Comments

I’m happy to report that experimental theater is alive and well in New York. Setting aside Dmitry Krymov’s thoughtfully layered, highly anticipated Big Trip productions at La MaMa (which I’m planning to write separately about), I’ve been generally beguiled so far this fall by the quality of the city’s avant-garde theatrical offerings. Read on for my thoughts on two prime examples, both very unusual but in my opinion highly recommended viewings.

PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE
HERE
Through September 30

Currently playing at HERE, you’ll find Normandy Serwood’s Psychic Self Defense (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), a wondrously immersive fantasia developed and commissioned by HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry Program. The plot is threadbare, to be sure. It involves two adults who are respectively transported to a mysterious and surreal world where they must fend for themselves. Beyond this suggestive, whimsically-wrought Alice in Wonderland-like scenario, the experience is more or less a purely aesthetic one. But what n fantastical experience it is! The lovingly handcrafted show takes obvious inspiration from the works of great Basil Twist (who is also serves as Dream Music Puppetry’s artistic director). Like the master puppeteer’s works, it playfully and abstractly deconstructs puppetry into its core components. Over the course of the show, Sherwood plays with depth and perception with invention and and thematic variations — often involving layers upon layers of beckoning, elaborately patterned fabric — resulting in a uniquely hallucinatory show that intensely engages the senses.

PROMETHEUS FIREBRINGER
Theatre for a New Audience
Through October 1

Then over in Brooklyn at the Polonsky Shakespeare, you’ll find Theatre for a New Audience’s quietly urgent production of Prometheus Firebringer (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) by Annie Dorsen. Written and performed by Dorsen, the piece is a well-researched treatise arguing against our rapidly increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the realm of the arts. What starts off as an unusual curiosity — seated at a desk, Dorsen dryly moderates the proceedings as a college professor would — turns out to be an eloquent and passionate diatribe. Elegantly distilled and succinctly rendered (the whole affair lasts not even an hour), the experience alternates between Dorsen’s patchwork but nonetheless cohesive and persuasive arguments — sourced completely from pre-existing writing (the text’s bibliography is projected behind her in real time) — and an A.I. driven “performance” by deadened, disembodied Greek masks representing Prometheus and his Chorus of children, altogether a strangely profound embodiment of the demigod’s tragic endgame. Throughout, Dorsen proves to be an unaffected, clear-eyed prophet. According to her, the same fate likely awaits us if we continue down the path we’re heading down.