THE HANGOVER REPORT – Little Lord’s SKINNAMARINK channels early childhood, menacingly and playfully

The company of Little Lord's "Skinnamarink" at NYTW's Next Door. Photo by Maria Baranova.

The company of Little Lord’s “Skinnamarink” at NYTW’s Next Door. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Before ending its brief run this weekend, I was able to catch Little Lord’s Skinnamarink, one of the many offerings of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door series. The show uses “McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers” – the arcane, arguably dated set of workbooks used by generations of American students to learn how to read – as a springboard for farcically and unsparingly examining our society’s approach to educating and socializing young kids.

The show ingeniously applied highly disciplined absurdist theater practices onto early American educational techniques. What’s revealed is uncanny, somewhat disturbing, and inadvertently very entertaining. In and of themselves, the text of the McGuffey workbooks is just plain bizarre, as is the wide-eyed experience of young childhood. Taken together in one potent little pill (with quite literally a good dollop of peanut butter!), Skinnamarink suggested that this time in all of our lives may not be the benign, safe place we nostalgically remember.

Indeed, the production, written and directed by Michael Levinton, was at once menacing and aggressively playful. Skinnamarink used adult actors – who gamely and raucously threw themselves into the show’s world – to channel young elementary school kids, complete with matching uniforms. It was perverse fun to watch them at play. At the end of the show’s intense, unpredictable 75 minutes, the sensation is one of relief of having escaped a particularly bad dream. Or was it?

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SKINNAMARINK
Off-Broadway, Play
Little Lord production at New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door Series
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Closed

 

Categories: Broadway, Theater

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