“Look with thine ears,” Lear tells poor blind Gloucester, and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until, at the most optimistic guesstimate, the middle of next year. Zoom fatigue set in months ago, but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can’t. The eyes tend toward the literal, while what we only hear can bloom, the way a novel does, in the privacy of the mind, as is the case with two new productions—one radical, one retro—that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the COVID era and beyond.
“A Thousand Ways” (produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype) was created by the duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who go by the moniker 600 Highwaymen and are known for devising inventive, sincere theatre of a kind that makes urbane audiences fatted on cynicism feel wonder afresh. In “This Great Country,” from 2012, seventeen performers, some experienced, some green, acted out scenes from “Death of a Salesman,” transforming that classic into something rich and strange; “Employee of the Year,” staged in 2014, had five girls under the age of eleven tell the story of one woman’s adulthood. Browde and Silverstone, who are partners in life as well as in theatre, insist that they hate audience participation, which is a little like Elmer Fudd saying that he hates hunting wabbits. “The Fever,” which premièred in New York in 2017, is described, by its creators, as “a public convergence,” and involves much communal writhing and laying on of hands; people who attended the show describe it as if they had gone to an ordinary church service and left speaking in tongues.
The term “experimental” tends to signal an ambition to flaunt difficulty and occlude meaning, but 600 Highwaymen’s experiments with theatrical form are distinctly generous. That is the case with “A Thousand Ways,” which takes a simple premise and turns it into magic. The piece is designed to be staged, ultimately, in three parts, the latter of which will involve physical encounters, safety permitting. Part 1 is being rolled out virtually, by fourteen theatres around the globe, from Toronto to Dublin to Singapore. It consists of an hour-long phone call between two strangers, mediated by a friendly female-sounding robot. I participated in a performance “at” Williams College, where my ticket confirmation came with instructions reminiscent of those you’d receive when pledging a secret society or delivering a ransom. At the stroke of eight, I was to call a number and be introduced to my partner; I should be in “a quiet, interruption-free indoor space,” with a fully charged phone. (In fact, I used a landline. Have you heard of them? They’re fantastic—no news alerts, and you can’t lose hours of your life to Instagram.) And there my partner was—a male voice, nameless, as I was to him. We were asked, by the robot, to say hello, and then to decide which of us would be Person A and which Person B. This accomplished, we were prompted to describe, in simple, specific terms, aspects of the rooms we were in, and to put our hands on our cheeks, grounding ourselves in the physical.
It’s amazing what a voice conveys, and what it doesn’t. Person A, I decided right away, was a retiree who’d figured he might as well try something new. Wrong! Prompted by the robot, my partner revealed that he was born in 1988. I, meanwhile, was asked merely to say if I was alive then; he would never know that I was only a year older than he was. The deliberately asymmetrical titration of information is integral to the mystery and pleasure of “A Thousand Ways.” It eliminates the polite “and you?” reflex. How novel, and relaxing, to give up conversational control—to feel interest without needing to perform it for the sake of social lubrication, to abandon the instinct to convince or entertain. I learned that my partner was gay and proud of it (“I do, in a very positive way, have limp wrists,” he said, when asked to describe a physical mannerism), and that he was a painter. He learned that my ancestors, whom I was asked to describe in three words, were poor Ashkenazi Jews. He found out that I have never shot a gun, and that I know how to train a dog. (Well, sort of.) The robot asked A to tell me if he had inherited money; she asked me to describe a quality from childhood that I wished I could recover. What we were doing was dancing, using only our voices, learning each other’s rhythms as the steps were called, the random and the banal grapevining with the profound.
There was a story, of a sort, woven through all this choreographed talk. The robot asked us to imagine that we were in a car that had broken down in a desert; by the end, we were camping together by a fire under the stars, disaster averted. Something here touched on the twee. Nonetheless, when the Person A in my own life walked through the door and accidentally destroyed my desert by turning on the lights, I waved him wildly out. I wanted to stay on that frequency, with that stranger, until we were severed by the robot’s brusque “goodbye,” leaving me with that best and rarest of feelings—wanting more.
This fall, the Public planned to mount Anne Washburn’s “Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017.” Since that became impossible, the theatre, along with Washington, D.C.,’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, has now produced it as a radio play. Adapted and directed by Saheem Ali, who also directed the Public’s successful audio production of “Richard II” over the summer, it is available for download on podcast platforms. The format works beautifully, and suggests a vast realm of possibility available to playwrights making new work. What could you do if you didn’t have to worry about the cost and the complication of a physical production, if simply reading out stage directions, with the help of some minimal, evocative sound design, could put your audience wherever you wanted it to be?
What works less well is Washburn’s play itself, which was written in the year it is set, and has the quality of a time capsule opened too soon. It could be revived in twenty years, if audiences want to remember what a certain subset of comfortable liberals sounded like as they tried to make sense of the first moments of the Trump Presidency, but otherwise it might be best left in the ground.
It is spring. James Comey has just testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A group of New York City friends in middle age have gathered at the upstate farmhouse recently bought by Jools and Richard (Sue Jean Kim and Richard Topol). Trump is the non-stop subject. Allie (Brooke Bloom) is furious that her friends seem to have accepted the scuttling of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination; Luis (Raúl Esparza), a lawyer who emigrated from El Salvador as a child, is attracted to the chaos surrounding Trump in a Faustian sort of way, but the significance of his origins in Trump’s America is left oddly unexplored.
Washburn has a good ear for ripped-from-the-op-ed-page outrage. The play hints at the impotence of a politics that is rooted in norms rather than in ideas, and enacts, with minimal critique, the liberals’ wheel-spinning obsession with the minutiae of a bankrupt political reality that is rotting the country but not directly affecting their own lives. What Washburn doesn’t do is make any of this matter much. The characters are generic, interchangeable city types, saying the familiar MSNBC things; the personal, which should ground the political, is alluded to, then dropped. In an aside that fascinates before it fizzles, a white farmer (Bruce McKenzie) tells us about adopting a boy from Kenya, though the son has been cut from this production. There are two ineffective fantasias, one a dull imagining of the notorious private dinner between Trump (Bill Camp, sounding like Frasier Crane) and Comey (Joe Morton), the other a baffling confrontation over the Iraq War between a weirdly statesmanlike Trump and a clownish George W. Bush (Philip James Brannon). Trump will be a subject long after he is—Inshallah—out of power. What is said about him onstage will matter only if it can tell us something about ourselves. ♦
