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THE BAD’UNS: CLOWN ACTS OF CONTAGION by Clowns Ex Machina

November 10, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

The Bad’uns: Clown Acts of Contagion is what happens when good clowns go bad. Created and directed by Kendall Cornell and Clowns Ex Machina, an all-women clown troupe, The Bad’uns includes Carla T. Bosnjak, Kendall Cornell, Lena Hudson, Julie Kinkle, Michaela Lind, Lucia Rich and Virginia Venk. As an ensemble, they are compelling, each donning the traditional red nose and performing some truly zany and absurd scenes. As a clown show, it’s a bit more cerebral than laugh-out-loud funny, although there are certainly some very funny moments. Overall, it excels at making pointed commentary on society’s expectations of women.

The Bad’uns is comprised of 30 or so short vignettes, each involving a combination of between one and all seven performers. (Two helpers, Maggie Tully and Rachel Weekley, wear paper bags on their heads and enter certain scenes as mummers.) Some of the pieces are songs, some are dances, some are silent, and some are monologues. Each piece touches on different themes of womanhood and is coupled with the idea of women behaving badly, how sometimes they are forced to behave badly due to circumstances and sometimes they behave badly just because.

In “Gimmee your Gum,” Lucia and Carla act like they are robbers holding the audience hostage, pointing their fingers in the shape of guns and intimidating the audience into giving them gum, a mint, anything to freshen their breath. Finally, they settle on taking a book from an audience member’s bag. Toy guns and other fake weapons feature prominently throughout The Bad’uns.

In a scene that made me laugh the most, a female voiceover compels Kendall to both ignore and cross the lines that society draws for us. These imaginary lines are drawn, crept up to, and crossed trepidatiously by the confused clown, unable to decide what is better: doing what the authoritative voice is telling her to do, or ignoring what she believes society is telling her to do.

A recurring theme is the clowns as criminals, as in “What are You In For?” where they are in a lineup and recite all the things they’ve done to get locked up, including things both hilariously minor and shockingly serious. In “Approach the Bench,” they continue the innuendo that perhaps the justice system is not wholly fair.

Throughout the show, the clowns portray all the types society associates with women, good and bad: women as delicate creatures (“Fancy Ladies and Gruel”), women as helpless, women as witches (“Burnt to Hell”), women as whores (“Sell your Body”), and women as mothers and nurturers. At the same time as they present these tropes, the clowns turn them right on their head into darkly humorous satire.

Clowns Ex Machina reminds us that despite how hard it can be to see the humor in a situation, it’s always worth the effort to make fun and laugh. Also, you don’t want to mess with these clowns.

The Bad’uns: Clown Acts of Contagion is playing at La MaMa through November 17.

Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses

November 4, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Amanda Bender, Maggie Hoffman and Erin Douglass in Radiohole’s NOW SERVING
Photo by Maria Baranova

Do you prefer to draw butter on your bread and then ball it up before eating it? Would you be able to catch airborne salad with your plate? Does eating meatloaf out of a giant papier-mâché frog head sound appealing? How about wine dripping from an IV bag?

If you answered any of the above with a resounding YES! then Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses might just be the performance for you. For all others, you might want to stick to the more staid theater uptown.

Written and performed by Radiohole, an experimental theater company, Now Serving is not quite a play. It’s more like performance art with audience participation and a side of dinner. Ten audience members sit at a long table in the center of the room and are served a four-course dinner. The rest of us in the cheaper gallery seats are voyeurs munching on popcorn and Junior Mints while we watch the mayhem unfold below.

To call Now Serving off-beat is like saying the ocean is kind of wet. This show is not for the weak of stomach or the straight of mind. Ostensibly a send-up of Emily Post’s rules for dinner party etiquette, it posits a four-course meal as the central narrative framework. It starts civilized enough, nobody yet covered in lettuce and dressing, and gets slightly more demented and surreal with each passing course. It’s like a mash-up of the dinner scene from Rocky Horror Picture Show, the “One of Us” scene from Freaks, and the Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland.

Company members Amanda Bender, Erin Douglass, Maggie Hoffman, and Eric Dyer (the aforementioned frog head) don’t exactly interact with the audience so much as plop dishes in front of them. (Sometimes, the food comes and goes via conveyer belt.) They have conversations of mostly non-sequiturs that occasionally touch on Post’s etiquette–how rain can contribute to the mood, women shouldn’t apologize so much, slow down and enjoy your food. Catherine McRae provides the evening’s music on violin, flute, and keyboard. Kristin Worrall makes an appearance at the end as the pastry chef who introduces the very intricate dessert course.

Kristin Worrall and Amanda Bender
Photo by Maria Baranova

At times, Now Serving feels like an attempt to perform every outrageous thing one can do at a dinner party and seeing what they can get away with. You have to admire the chutzpah, once you get over the confusion. It may not be a true feast for all the senses, but it kind of makes you feel as though your senses don’t wholly belong to you. At least for a short period of time.

Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses is playing through November 16 at The Collapsable Hole.

All For One Theater’s Dark Comedy MONSOON SEASON

November 3, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Therese Plaehn and Richard Thieriot in **Monsoon Season**
Photo by Maria Baranova

It’s monsoon season in Arizona and all the rain in Phoenix can’t wash away the crazy that is conjured in All For One Theater’s production of Monsoon Season. This darkly funny play, written by Lizzie Vieh and directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, is practically two distinct solo acts that intertwine in an interesting way. Like two sides of the same coin, both complement each other in the end.

IT specialist Danny (Richard Thieriot) is on the brink of exhaustion. His wife just kicked him out of the house, his four-year-old daughter doesn’t want to see him, even the hermit crab he bought as a pet keeps hiding from him. He can’t catch a break. To keep himself sane, he spouts facts about the Juarez Cartel and visits the strip club next door to his new apartment. Conversely, the blaring neon lights are keeping him awake and he can’t afford blinds despite moonlighting as an Uber driver. To compensate, he takes microsleeps (kind of like a spontaneous nap), which can occur at any moment.

Julia (Therese Plaehn) is a makeup artist and beauty vlogger (her YouTube channel is called “Pretty As Fuck”). She is a hot mess whose life only gets messier once her husband moves out and her drug dealer boyfriend moves in, feeding her Adderall habit. She laments that she wasted her good years on her loser husband, so she hooks “boy toy” Shane. The only problem is that Shane is kind of abusive and people keep showing up at her house to buy drugs. Soon, she starts hallucinating that there are strange birds in her backyard. It’s enough to drive someone to do something crazy.

The performances by both actors are great, especially when they play to other characters that are invisible to the audience. The nuances of Danny and Julia as people who are spiraling, but who are also in denial about it, are played out really well and to humorous effect. What could have been a really bleak story turns out kind of sweet, in a sick and twisted way, thanks to the script and the ability of the actors to make these characters somewhat likeable.

If I have one complaint it’s that the constantly changing neon lights are annoying and distracting. Of course, this is the point of the neon lights in the play. They represent the strip club lights outside Danny’s window, making him unable to sleep and leading him down a dark path. Aside from that bit of set design (You-Shin Chen), the rest of it is pretty cool, especially at the end when blacklights make everything look like a surreal dream.

I like to think that the play being set during monsoon season is a nod to how weather can make people a little nutty. When it’s raining like crazy in the desert, where it doesn’t normally rain that much, it can seem like things are a little unnatural. Like during a really bad storm, people do things they may not do otherwise. But after that storm, when the rain passes, the sun always comes out and makes things seem just a little bit better.

Monsoon Season is playing through November 23 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

THE CATASTROPHE CLUB Invites Us to Ponder the End of the World

November 2, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Cassandra Nwokah, Sue Kim, Stewart Walker, Dan Kublick (lying down)
Photo by Jeremy Varne

Life imitates art imitates life in the site-specific, time-traveling, meta-play The Catastrophe Club. Produced by Sea Dog Theater, intelligently written by Devin Burnam, and capably directed by Shaun Bennet Fauntleroy, it joins an ever increasing list of theatrical presentations that talk about our collective anxiety around climate change. It’s a play about the not so calm before the shit storm.

The year is 2520. The audience has been invited by a mysterious woman named Ruth (Rachel Towne) to witness her pet project, a simulation of events that happened over one evening 500 years in the past, based on a time capsule found in this very bar. She has programmed avatars that look, speak, and behave the way humans did in the year 2019. From tidbits gleaned through Ruth’s narration presented as a matter of fact, life now is very different than it was in 2019. This was before The Great Flood and Freeze, an apocalyptic event that precipitated the near extinction of humans. Gatherings in bars such as this one are now illegal, there’s no such thing as art, and humans can forget about death because of a hormone that comes from bears.

Dan Kublick and Rachel Towne
Photo by Jeremy Varne

The central narrative of the play-within-the-play is of four friends who get together one night at this New York City bar in 2019–the beginning of the end, as Ruth tells it. The friends are climate scientists who met while working as part of a research team at Columbia. They have formed a little group they call The Catastrophe Club, named so because something terrible always happens when they get together. On this night, it appears as though the calamity is going to befall Teres (Sue Kim), who is anxiously awaiting a phone call from a lab that will tell her if she is dying.

Her friend Zizzie (Cassandra Nwokah) is the optimistic realist–she knows that the world is probably going to end in a dozen years or so but still wants to have a good time and strives to comfort her friend. Anders (Stewart Walker) is the group’s old boss, an arrogant, party boy who sold his company for a fortune. The drinks, and the doomsday hideout, are on him. Then there’s Emime (Dan Kublick), who was fired by Anders and is essentially his foil. Emime is a jokester and too principled for his own good, choosing to play clarinet and perform stand-up in his ripped jeans rather than be a sell-out.

Stewart Walker and Dan Kublick
Photo by Jeremy Varne

And there you have it: four people with a fascinating group dynamic that only grows more so as the play goes on. From their experience, they have the knowledge and foresight of the impending apocalypse and decide to record themselves for posterity. Indeed, Ruth has reconstructed these people based on their drawings, audio and video recordings, and writings. Of course, Ruth’s connection to these people goes beyond mere curiosity; it’s enough to risk her life and the lives of her captive audience.

Although immersive, The Catastrophe Club requires minimal participation from the audience, only that we pretend for a mere 90 minutes that we exist in the year 2520. The bar setting makes it feel like a speakeasy, especially because it is underground and accessed through a secret door. The audience is part of the setting, sitting at tables and benches scattered throughout the bar while the play happens all around. The actors give masterful performances, using the richly detailed and naturalistic dialogue of the script to cement the intimacy of their friendship. It’s as if we are simply watching a group of friends enjoying a night out drinking and commiserating about the end of the world.

Stewart Walker, Sue Kim, Cassandra Nwokah
Photo by Jeremy Varne

I admire theater that plays with time and non-linear structures. The ones that do it well make us think about and question our reality. The Catastrophe Club does so with ease and to great effect. It speaks to the things we’re afraid of but with humor, heart, and hope for the perseverance of humanity.

The Catastrophe Club is running through November 22 at a secret location in the East Village. Ticket holders will receive instructions on how to access the space 24 hours before the show.

An Exploration of Public Sexuality in TO COME (EXTENDED)

October 27, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Sex is no longer confined behind closed doors in Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s to come (extended) at NYU Skirball. Fifteen performers covered head to toe in shiny, turquoise bodysuits move slowly into groups, pairs, and solo exhibiting one sexual position after another, frozen like statues in orgiastic combinations. With their faces covered, the performers are basically genderless, the material clinging to their bodies and smoothing (most) everything out. Stripping out of their suits, they don nothing but socks, shoes, and earbuds. In unison–like a strange, nude choir–they vocalize a long, dispassionate orgasm. Out of the silence, music explodes–Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The dancers come alive and start to lindy hop with abandon, swing dancing while their arms, legs, and other (ahem) appendages swing along.

On its surface, to come (extended) is a simple piece. An all white stage (set design by Ingvartsen and Jens Sethzman) provides a stark contrast for the blue bodysuits (by Jennifer Defays). In the second half, a curtain the same color as the suits is pulled around all three sides of the stage and provides another contrast, this time against the nude bodies. Lighting (design by Sethzman) plays with the mood as the music (arrangement by Adrien Gentizon) plays with speed, slowing down and then speeding back up while the dancers keep up with the pace.

It turns out that the stillness of the performers in the first half is just as impressive as the sustained bursts of dancing in the second half. Because the first half of to come (extended) is in complete silence and the movements are so slow, it induces a trance-like state that is quickly shattered in the second half. The physicality of the bodies is expressed equally in both fast and slow states.

Part of The Red Pieces, a series by Ingvartsen that explores sexuality and public spaces, to come (extended) puts sex front and center where it can’t hide in the private sphere. The nudity, like in Ingvartsen’s 7 Pleasures, is so in your face that it almost negates the sensuality that naked bodies often inspire. With its constant repetition and incongruous matchup of music and mood, it’s more a confrontational experience than a titillating one. Just don’t expect them to come…onstage.

Forbidden Broadway is Back With Hilarious Musical Parody

October 20, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Clockwise from top left: Houston, Mayagoitia, Stern, Turchin and Collins-Pisano in **Forbidden Broadway**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

There’s a place where all the Broadway haters can go–a magical place where songs are sung that make fun of the overblown, over-produced, based-on-a-movie jukebox musical. It’s called Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation and, incidentally, it’s also a place where all Broadway lovers can go. Yes, that’s right, both haters and lovers of Broadway will feel welcome here. It’s a fantastic place full of parody and laughter, spoofing all things theatrical.

Forbidden Broadway is an Off-Broadway mainstay that just came back after a 5-year hiatus. This newest version is so current that it references something that was announced just the day before (the musical version of Mrs. Doubtfire is set to open this spring). Gerard Alessandrini–who created, wrote, and directed The Next Generation as well as 25 other iterations of Forbidden Broadway since 1982–must update the show constantly. He certainly seems to keep the ensemble on their toes, hilariously re-writing the lyrics to famous musical numbers and, in this show, giving his take on the very nonmusical The Ferryman.

Speaking of the ensemble, each of the five performers gives memorable performances as they rotate through, costume-change into, and present dozens of characters, all to the accompaniment of pianist Fred Barton. Youngest cast member Joshua Turchin impressively plays such characters as Evan Hansen (in Evan Has-Been), The Phantom of the Opera, Santino Fontana as Tootsie in “It’s Got to Be a Musical” (lampooning musicals based on popular movies), the 12-year-old son in The Ferryman (or, “How Are Things in Irish Drama?”), and Albus Severus in “Harry Potter and His Cursed Child: Magic For Two” (re-written from the Pippin song “Magic To Do”).

Jenny Lee Stern lends her powerful voice as Gwen Verdon in a Fosse/Verdon medley, Judy Garland in a send-up of Renee Zellweger’s portrayal in Judy, Aunt Maggie in The Ferryman, Mary Poppins (poking fun at Emily Blunt and introducing an In Memoriam style montage showing us “Where the Lost Shows Go”), Bette Midler (“Hello Dolly Madison” set to “Alexander Hamilton”), and Mary Testa in Oklahoma! (aka Woke-lahoma!).

Stern, Houston, Mayagoitia, and Collins-Pisano
in **Woke-lahoma!**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Immanuel Houston does fine work parodying Andre De Shields in “Forbidden Hadestown,” Toulouse-Lautrec in “Moulin Rude” (mocking jukebox musicals), Jeremy Pope in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the IRA guy in The Ferryman, and my personal favorites: Billy Porter singing Gypsy’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” re-written as “Ev’rything Now is Inclusive,” and Jennifer Holliday singing her heart out to “And I Am Telling You” from Dreamgirls.

Houston as Billy Porter and Collins-Pisano
as Lin-Manuel Miranda
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Aline Mayagoitia is amazing as Karen Olivo in “Moulin Rude,” Elsa in Frozen singing “Let It Go”(here as “Overblown”), Caitlin in The Ferryman, Bernadette Peters as one of three Broadway veterans (including Bette Midler and Jennifer Holliday) in “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” and Laurey in Woke-lahoma!

Mayagoitia as Elsa
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Chris Collins-Pisano rounds out the wonderful cast as Danny Burstein in “Moulin Rude,” Alex Brightman in Beetlejuice, Bob Fosse in Fosse/Verdon, Tevye in “Fiddler in Yiddish” (where “Tradition” is re-written as “Translation”), two characters in The Ferryman, Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping in “Say No to This” about casting Billy Porter as Angelica in Hamilton, Harry Potter Sr. in “Harry Potter and His Cursed Child,” and Curly in Woke-lahoma!

Stern and Collins-Pisano in **Fosse/Verdon**
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Of course there are more fabulous group numbers such as The Prom: It’s Time to Dance, making fun of the teen musical genre and its propensity for indulging in large grand finales. There’s something for everyone in this show. Nothing and no one is spared in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. It is quite simply a Broadway lover’s dream, a must-see for everyone who loves, or loathes, theater.

Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation runs through November 29 at The Triad Theatre.

Hi Mom! Monologues from the Characters of Climate Change

October 15, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Photos by Lloyd Mulvey and Hercules Kavela

There is a trend of theatrical activism happening now–theater that tells great stories but also sends a social or political message. Theater is actually a great medium for activists to educate audiences while also entertaining them. Plays like Water, Water, Everywhere, Thoughts & Prayers, and, most recently, Hi Mom! Monologues from the Characters of Climate Change are a necessary part of the changing political landscape right now. But before you go thinking that Hi Mom! is another grim characterization of the even grimmer reality of the climate crisis, let me set you straight. It is grim, because it would be dishonest if it weren’t. But it’s also funny as hell, beautiful, sad, chilling, and inspiring.

Conceived by Laura Delhauer, and co-directed by Delhauer and Jonathan Zautner, Hi Mom! is a collection of monologues from multiple playwrights that all feature a different character dealing with some aspect of climate change. In Ocean Mother, written and performed by Jason C. Stuart, a man visits his mother at her beach house and comes across a beached sea turtle that’s choking on a plastic bag. Greta (written by Reed Arnold) is from the perspective of that sea turtle (Delhauer), as she explains the impossible obstacles turtles have to survive to make it to adulthood, just before she spots something that looks a lot like a jellyfish.

Morality of Broccoli, written and performed by Jamie Roach, is a hilarious confrontation of the many impossible choices we face at the grocery store just trying to pick out the food that’s going to cause the least amount of damage to the planet. On the flip side, Dace McNally performs in ORANGUTAN (Arnold) as one of the great apes whose home is being destroyed just so Americans can enjoy more junk food.

Written by Delhauer and performed by Enette Fremont, Let’s Talk is an important reminder that climate change affects poor communities and people of color much worse than others. In Lucero Ruiz De Chavez Bobadilla’s Life Sentence and Delhauer’s Activist, two people (Jacqueline Guillen and Nino Gurgenidze) protest the many environmental injustices facing modern society, and sometimes face drastic consequences.

The dark side of the climate disaster is personified in Are We Having Fun Yet? (Micah Delhauer). In this piece, two sinister forces (Guillen and McNally) lament how easy their job has been convincing humans to destroy the planet. In Eulogy of the Hydrocarbon (Arnold), we see a more human side to another enemy: the head of an oil company (Richard Brundage). And (surprise!) he actually turns out to be a sympathetic and complex human being.

In the final piece, Mama (Arnold), Delhauer plays the mother of all mankind, who from infancy has been demanding more and more tools and resources to build a world that is more comfortable, more convenient and, ultimately, more damaging…damn the consequences. As much as Mama wants to make her “baby” happy, she is unable to turn a blind eye to the destruction that her unwavering mollification has wrought.

Hi Mom! is an ever-changing project, with more monologues ready to be cycled in and out of the rotation. These stories are a welcome addition to the environmental activism that is playing out around the world.

Playwrights and other collaborators are welcome to join the Hi Mom! project. If you are interested in more information about future performances or want to be involved, check out @nkdlight on Instagram or email .

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST: A Shakespearean Romp in the Summer of Love

October 12, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Sometimes, modernized adaptations of Shakespeare plays work really well, as with this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing. Other times, as with Thomas G. Waites’ adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, it’s a little silly. But, to be fair, it is kind of a silly premise. King Ferdinand (Joshua Lazarus) and his three noblemen swear off women for three years just as four lovely ladies, led by the beautiful French princess, Maria (Grace Langstaff), arrive at court to discuss a piece of land. The King swiftly falls in love with the princess, as do his lords with her ladies. Lord Berowne (Steven Smith) is captivated by Lady Rosaline (Melissa Molerio), Lord Longaville (Daniel Kornegay) by Lady Michaela (Julie Spina), and Lord Dumain (Luis Guillen) by Lady Katherine (Chandler Robyn). Of course, the women each conveniently fall in love with the men who love them.

This adaptation is supposed to take place during the Summer of Love (an apt time period considering the romantic story line) but the only indication that we are being transported to that setting is the costumes and music that are thrown in willy-nilly. The actors gamely don the bell-bottoms, peasant tops, and long flowing skirts that the era is known for, but it becomes a bit over characterized and makes me long for straightforward period clothing.

Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate the musical interludes. Songs by musicians of the 1960s such as Jackson Browne, The Doors, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, and The Rolling Stones are sung by the ensemble at the beginning of each scene. These are some of my favorite songs but they are also a bit nonsensical, seemingly interjected just so we can be reminded that this is supposed to be the 1960s. I don’t quite get some of the musical choices either (or why there are three Beatles songs, four if you count the Joe Cocker version of “With a Little Help From My Friends”) and what they have to do with story at any given time.

Despite this weak connection to the summer of 1969, the ensemble does a good job with the material. The play definitely benefits from having a solid supporting cast playing out a couple of side plots, including Robert Thorpe as Boyet, a courtier of the princess, Jonathan Mastrojohn as Costard, the country bumpkin who tries to trick the noblemen by switching around their love letters, Olivia Hardin as the country wench Jaquenetta, Brandon Hynum as the foppish Don Adriano de Armado, and Josh Rubenstein as his page, Mouth.

The text is heavy on witty wordplay and flirtatious double entendres spoken by both men and women. There’s also a lot more overemphasized rhyming than I’ve seen in most Shakespeare plays, which can be cloying at times and charming at others. I wish that Waites had the actors add more physicality to make the story more interesting and meaningful. The plot is very simple and perhaps it’s this simplicity that makes it kind of dull.

If you like the music and styles of the sixties and don’t mind that it feels kind of forced in the context of this play, Love’s Labour’s Lost may be for you. This is no Hair, although you may hear the music.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is playing at the Gene Frankel Theatre through October 26.

Immerse Yourself in WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE

October 6, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Anya Krawcheck as house spirit
Photo by Tess Howsam

Two years ago, Exquisite Corpse Company brought a mesmerizing play to an abandoned house on Governor’s Island. A Ribbon About A Bomb was about female artists and the confines placed on them by society. In ECC’s ambitious new production, Water, Water, Everywhere…, they’ve successfully inhabited the same house, this time telling the story of two families who lived there at different times in history. The immersive, site-specific play splits audience members into three tracks that follow different paths within the overall narrative structure. The audience follows characters from room to room throughout the house. What we find within speaks to larger themes of memory, family, conservation, and environmental responsibility.

In 2019, Johnny (Jorge Sánchez-Diaz) and Molly (Stephanie Orta-Vázquez) wheel their elderly mother (Josanna Vaz) through the old house where they used to live in 1996 when their father (Ignacio Garcia Bustelo) was stationed on the island with the U.S. Coast Guard. She is losing her memory and they think bringing her here will help her remember. She seems catatonic and unresponsive. They leave her and suddenly she comes to life and wanders through the house, remembering, whether she likes it or not.

Ignacio Garcia Bustelo
Photo by Tess Howsam

In the 1800s, Theo (Varak Baronian) and his twin sister, Nora (Megan Ermilio), are excitedly anticipating the arrival of new pipes that will bring running water to the house. Theo writes to a woman from a water-starved future named Fountain (Vanessa Lynah), who wanders through the house searching for any drop of water, running into characters from both pasts. Leading the audience on this journey is a house spirit (Anya Krawcheck) that exists in all times and places.

Clearly, there’s some magical realism afoot, which creates a surreal, dream-like quality to the play. Adding to the surrealism are staggeringly detailed set pieces and artwork that make it feel like the kind of house that would exist inside someone’s memories (the incredible set design is by an eight-person team of designers and visual artists). If that were all directors Tess Howsam and Tara Elliott had accomplished, that would be enough. But Water, Water, Everywhere… also features brilliant dialogue (Leah Barker, Blake Bishton, Emily Krause, and Elinor T. Vanderburg), original music (Krause and Vanderburg), clever sound and lighting design (Jesse Vance and Ariella Axelbank), and moving performances by the ensemble.

The scenes in Water, Water, Everywhere… fit together like puzzle pieces, complex and precise, tying the three tracks together like strands of hair in a braid, intertwining throughout the space and then coming together in a breathtaking finale. With Water, Water, Everywhere… Exquisite Corpse has created a gorgeous palette on the canvas of brick and mortar.

Water, Water, Everywhere… runs Saturdays and Sundays through October 27 at 2pm & 4:30pm in house 404A on Colonels Row, Governor’s Island.

Mentalist Derren Brown reveals his SECRET on Broadway

September 25, 2019 / Tami Shaloum

Derren Brown in **Derren Brown: Secret**
Photo by Matthew Murphy

Something happens to you after seeing Derren Brown’s Broadway show Secret – hours, days, perhaps a week will go by and you’ll still be thinking: How does he do it? Each detail will play out in your mind until you believe you have an explanation for nearly everything…but then, what about that bit, or that trick, and, oh man, how about that ending?!

Brown, a well-known mentalist/magician/hypnotist in his native UK, is virtually unknown here in America. Does this fact allow him to swoop in under the radar and pull the wool over our eyes? You’ll have to watch his series on the BBC or watch any of his multiple Netflix specials to find out. Maybe you’ll see his recorded programs and think, That looks amazing, but it’s a TV show. How real can it be?

As impressive as his specials are, a live show is a different beast altogether. All I know is that, for two and a half hours, my mind was blown in new and surprising ways. Written by Brown, Andy Nyman and Andrew O’Connor, who also co-direct, Secret is a marvel of showmanship, technical genius, and stunning audience manipulation. The show is, to put it mildly, uncanny. It will make you pay attention to your surroundings more carefully, to look for clues, for signs, for anything that will give an inkling as to what has just happened and how.

Talented as he is, Brown’s persona is that of an approachable, affable guy. You really do feel a sense of warmth from him. He needs to be likeable to gain our trust and perform his tricks without us feeling like he’s betrayed or manipulated us, which is exactly what he’s doing. But I don’t care, I laughed my ass off and had a great time.

Derren Brown and audience member in **Derren Brown: Secret**
Photo by Matthew Murphy

Secret is more than just a magic show. Brown talks about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones that make us think we all fit into a neat package. Indeed, he weaves a surreptitious story through his act. One that you won’t realize is a story until the very end when the conclusion reveals itself in an uproariously satisfying way. It will even unravel a bit more after the fact. It might make you rethink all the decisions you make. At the very least, it will make you smile.

Round the World Stage