Very little theatre productions 2017 series#

Witnessing the late, immeasurably great choreographer Pina Bausch’s legendary double bill in the flesh is, without exaggeration, a life-altering experience. ‘Café Müller’ / ‘The Rite of Spring’ (BAM) Schreck and Borinsky found the political, and the powerful, in the personal. In both pieces, the room was abuzz with both curiosity and compassion. Borinsky created a kind of civic pageant - a meditation on how we take care of ourselves as individuals and as societies - out of tinsel and craft paper, and Schreck grappled with ideas of inalienable rights and painful repression by taking a deep dive into her own history (as a child she used to give speeches about the Constitution to win prize money in American Legion Hall rhetoric competitions). Both Alex Borinsky’s soulful, searching Of Government (with its cast of almost 20 women of all ages and backgrounds) and Heidi Schreck’s witty, vulnerable, mostly monologue play tackled big questions by staying persistently small.

Very little theatre productions 2017 series#

Okay, so I’m cheating here, but these two pieces from Clubbed Thumb’s 2017 Summerworks series have stuck with me long into the colder months, engaged in a conversation with each other in my mind.

‘Of Government / What the Constitution Means to Me’ (Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks) It was a challenge to pick just ten, so I want to quickly shine a light on some that didn’t make the list, from the classical to the postapocalyptic, all courageous, thrilling, questioning pieces of theater from this maelstrom of a year: The Government Inspector (Red Bull Theater), Hamlet (the Public), Indecent (Cort Theatre), A Doll’s House Part 2 (John Golden Theatre), Peter Pan (Bedlam), After the Blast (Lincoln Center), Mementos Mori (Manual Cinema BAM), and The Present (Barrymore Theatre).

Though some were light and others quite dark indeed, I left each one of them feeling the little bird of hope beating its wings against my ribs. They eschewed the great temptations of a year like 2017 - didacticism, agitprop-ery, moral grandstanding - and instead found transcendence in the execution of a deeply personal vision. In this year of daily shifts, shocks, and sucker punches, I went from being an opinionated director to being a critic, and these ten productions, ranging from intimate to epic, all touched something expansive for me in their specificity. If 2016 was the frying pan, 2017 has frequently felt like the fire. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Photo Courtesy Oliver Look The Rite of Spring