Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Nora Burns’ THE VILLAGE channels disco, Charles Busch, and “Our Town” in its giddy resuscitation of late 1970s New York

• By drediman
• February 14, 2023
• No Comments

Last night at Dixon Place in the Lower East Side, I attended the Off-Off-Broadway production of The Village, A Disco Daydream by stalwart downtown theater artist Nora Burns. Largely set in Greenwich Village during the late 1970s, the piece reconstructs a day in the lives of a motley group of friends as they bask in love, lust, friendships, and the carefree attitude of the times.

The show proved such a crowd-pleasing hit in the fall that it’s been brought back this winter for an encore engagement. Having seen the production – which registers less like the daydream of its title and more like a fever dream – I can see why. Wickedly smart and bordering on the absurd, The Village is reminiscent of the broad, meta-theatrical plays of Charles Busch. As such, in addition to being a giddy resuscitation of 1970s New York, Burns’s playfully naughty, self-referential work calls to mind the anything-goes sensibility of downtown theater of the era that its depicting. Even if the play’s events seem not to add up to much and its references to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town are a bit too on point during the play’s concluding scenes, the overall impact is one of sheer life and vitality through the LGBT lens of disco culture.

Thankfully, director Adam Pivorotto’s scrappy yet inspired production has no problems keeping up with the frantic, nearly schizophrenic transitions required by the play. Burns’ lovingly drawn archetypes – the rich daddy, the hustler, the drag queen, the ditzy straight girlfriend, the go-go boys, the clean-cut innocent, the impossibly drugged out junkie, etc. – are all given raucous life by a cast that thoroughly understands how to pull off camp (kudos especially to Glace Chase as the show’s sassy but irresistible Stage Manager).

RECOMMENDED

THE VILLAGE, A DISCO DAYDREAM
Off-Broadway, Play
Dixon Place
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Through February 24