Results tagged “ontological”

It can sometimes spell trouble when an Off-Off Broadway production features cast members of a certain age; seniors willing to perform for peanuts have been known to sink otherwise competent ensembles with an awkward amateurishness. It's hard to say whether Rae C. Wright is in fact an AARP card-carrier—she's in impeccable shape, for one thing—but her appearance in Tina Satter's sort-of-musical Family initially gave me pause. It shouldn't have. Far from scuttling the show into a community theater morass, she electrifies Satter's enjoyably daffy production with an incisive, intelligent humor, portraying the matriarch (Mum) of a once-prominent family in decline.

If you're going through the hassle of living in overpriced New York City and not bothering to check out Richard Foreman's annual phantasmagoria, you're really missing out. Stepping into the little theater at St. Mark's Church every February is like taking a mental vacation to another dimension. And this year's Gothic baroque extravaganza is more dynamic than the past few years, in which Foreman experimented with film and a more subdued stagecraft. For now at least, he's dropped the film and picked up avant-garde composer John Zorn, who's composed a feral, heavy metal score for the show, with occasional bursts of Tasmanian Devil vocalization.

In Joseph Campbell's hugely influential work of comparative mythology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the world's hero myths are boiled down to three narrative stages: the action, the trials, and the hero at home. But what about that fourth stage, when the retired hero is puttering around the house with no greater trial than cleaning the leaves out of the gutter? In mythic figurations: a power triptych, the plight of the washed-up hero is milked for steady laughs by Ilan Bachrach, who plays "The Warrior," a shirtless slob with a hairline that's receding as steadily as his odds of ever slaying a dragon again.

It’s almost that time of year when the NYC Fringe Festival dominates the theater scene with hundreds of new shows of wildly varying quality. But before the Fringe sucks the air out of the room in August, it’s worth noting that July is packed with a number of smaller, more manageable and generally more-reliable theater festivals. For starters:

For the past four decades, Richard Foreman has challenged and fascinated audiences with a deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic incorporating traces of vaudeville, Jungian philosophy, slapstick, surrealism and myriad other disparate sources to create what he calls the Ontological-Hysteric theater. His newest “theatrical machine”, called Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, is the third in a series of works that heavily emphasize video projection, this time shot on location in Japan.