Under the Radar isn't the only genre-busting experimental theater festival happening this month—P.S. 122 has just kicked off its 7th annual COIL Festival of experimental dance, theater and performance works. Formerly lasting about a week, COIL has been greatly expanded and will now run through January 29th. There are a lot of intriguing productions in the works this year, staged at various venues downtown while P.S. 122 undergoes an extensive renovation. (One space at the legendary performance mecca is still in use.) more ›

After over a decade of cultural dumpster diving on the Brooklyn bohemian fringe, Radiohole, New York's most deliriously debauched theater company, has babies to look out for. Two of the troupe's founding members, Erin Douglass and Maggie Hoffman, are recent moms, and the trademark bucket of beer, set out for the audience at each performance, is now accompanied by a plea for donations to their "Beers for Babies" fund. (They say the money goes for child-care, not kegs for kids.) So it makes a certain amount of sense for Radiohole, whose bracing productions are often accompanied by a chaser of self-referential surrealism, to take inspiration from the Eisenhower-era domestic melodramas of Douglas Sirk, namely his 1955 film All That Heaven Allows. more ›

Those Tibetan Buddhists who spend their days toiling over sand mandalas are going about it all wrong—they'd have a lot more fun making marshmallow mandalas instead. Lovers of those gelatinous white sugar puffs will be alternately tantalized and tortured by Terrible Things, a new theatrical dance piece that just opened at Performance Space 122. Upon entering the theater, an army of 1,000 marshmallows are found arrayed on stage in orderly rows. It's a simple pattern, but a hypnotic one, and as the performance unfolds, three female dancers meticulously herd the marshmallows into ever-evolving patterns. Only two are eaten, and none are offered to the audience. more ›

The National Theater of the United States of America [NTUSA] is not an official, federally-sanctioned performance troupe, but that's a trivial detail. This mischievous gang of innovators represents some of the best attributes of downtown "experimental" theater, and in the eight or nine years since their first production—a neo-vaudevillian romp staged in the tiny basement of a Times Square deli—they've come to earn their tongue-in-cheek title. That Obama's stimulus package doesn't allocate more financing for their endeavors is an outrage! more ›

Over a dozen Broadway musicals and plays will close this month, and Charles Isherwood at the Times is getting a little verklempt about it. The number of productions bowing out amounts to almost half the total number of shows currently on Broadway! According to Crain's, box office grosses increased during the holiday season, but were still 10.6% less than the same time period in 2007. more ›

The Debate Society, arguably New York's most charming theater company, is adept at seducing their audience with the atmosphere of whatever locale they choose to evoke. Their latest work, called Cape Disappointment, meticulously conjures up Gothic worlds of lost highways, traveling salesmen, Eisenhower-era teens, and roadside bandits. Designer Karl Allen has done excellent work transforming the upstairs theater at P.S. 122 into a romantically decayed drive-in movie, even installing vintage speaker boxes throughout the audience. And to complete the scene, free bags of popcorn are distributed—noisy, crinkly bags that maddeningly break the spell just like at the cinema. more ›

On his birthday in October 2001, theatrical gearhead Joe Silovsky read a story in the New York Times that would become his obsession for the next seven years. Titled, "The Money Is All Gone in Tonga, And the Jester's Role Was No Joke," the article detailed a sensational financial scandal roiling the island kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. It had emerged that the king of Tonga had raked in some $26 million selling Tongan citizenship and passports to Hong Kong Chinese who were worried about an impending Chinese takeover. But he had refused to keep the fortune in Tonga because, he said, "the government would only spend it on roads." Instead, the loot was deposited into a checking account at the Bank of America. more ›

If you like a little sensual touch with your performance art—and really, who doesn't?—be sure to sit in the first row at BLIND.NESS, the dark and steamy new dance-theater piece by WaxFactory at P.S. 122. One dude up front who received a prolonged nuzzling from performer Erika Latta was overheard gushing as he walked out, "That was the best play I've seen in a long time!" I wouldn't go that far (then again, I was in the fifth row), and BLIND.NESS isn't so much a play as it is a dense multidisciplinary collage, but it does succeed as an uninhibited exploration of eros and all its attendant agony. more ›

With minimal props (a quill pen, a gas mask), rich sound design, and vivid video projection, Michael McQuilken's one man show, A Day in Dig Nation, sets out to be a dystopian exploration of our "media-drenched" post-modern phantasmagoria, as seen through the giant eyes of Rex, an isolated office drone kept complacent by video games and television. Then the apocalypse happens, and Rex survives in a bunker for 26 years until he finally hears a woman's voice calling for survivors over the ham radio. But she sounds kind of demanding, and rather than respond he goes back to working on his robot. more ›

Wow, this show is bizarre. But bizarre in a way that carries on P.S. 122’s scintillating legacy as a downtown refuge for freaky, outré performance art. Musician/performer Neal Medlyn’s latest rock "tragic-comedy," Unpronounceable Symbol, pays musical homage to Prince, with a live band led by Kiki & Herb’s Kenny Mellman, who co-wrote the show and rearranged a bunch of Prince B-sides for the score. more ›

When asked why she wants to learn Japanese, a character in Kristen Kosmas’s play Hello Failure replies, “I want to chop away at the wilderness of my mind.” One suspects the playwright's reasons for developing her own distinctive theatrical language are the same; and, fortunately, her unique voice has a similar "clearing" effect on the audience. By the show’s end, you may find yourself walking out with a slightly less restless mind, though you may not know just what it was that moved you. more ›

The Under the Radar festival of cutting edge international theater, curated by former P.S. 122 artistic director Mark Russell, continues through next weekend. Here’s a brief rundown of three shows seen so far. more ›

The city is showing the door to a daycare facility that has called P.S. 122 its home for 26 years. The Children's Liberation Daycare Center (CLDC), which serves 88 kids between the ages of 2 and 6, is going to court later this month to object to its ejection from the building, with no plan for the daycare center's return. The CLDC shares P.S. 122 with three arts organizations and it's the city's Dept. of... more ›