Catch the Wave

What: Swim Shorts 3
Location: The Holiday Inn Midtown on the roof, 440 West 57th Street
Date: series 1 ran until July 29; series 2 runs until August 12
Cost: $18, plus an extra $7 for a post performance dip in the pool
Bohemian Factor: Hidden behind their sunglasses and tans
Geek Factor: Present, but potentially canceled out by the proximity of Holiday Inn tourists.

July 21, 2007

Ever since celebrity director Peter Sellars staged Antony and Cleopatra at Harvard’s Adams House swimming pool, ambitious thespians have gravitated towards aquatic settings. But one need not be an avant-garde director – or even a theatre person – to understand the appeal of swimming pools. Sure, there may be controversy over whether splashy displays of watery hi-jinks advance the plot, or even distract viewers with the gimmick. But no one can dispute the fundamental attractiveness of bringing the audience closer to an imagined seaside, especially now when the City’s air is sweltering with ozone-infested, viscous humidity, and every urbanite covets admission to one of those exclusive rooftop swimming pools.

Taking advantage of this primal urge within all of us New Yorkers, Impetuous Theater Group’s Swim Shorts 3, makes no pretense of delivering ambitious narrative, or heck, any narrative at all some of the time, in exchange for a relatively inexpensive evening sitting around the Holiday Inn pool in Hell’s Kitchen, where a post-performance dip costs a mere $7 extra. Audience members sit on deck chairs, the actors get thoroughly soaked, and entire sentences occasionally get swallowed by an acoustical black hole, but it’s OK….are we really there for dramatic complexity?

Actually, the playwrights contributing the short, almost intentionally forgettable plays that make up “Swim Shorts” do have the burden of holding our attention, without being spiritually tortured by the desire to open up that copy of “Harry Potter Book Seven” that most audience members had stowed in tell-tale Barnes and Noble handle bags (after all, I was there the weekend of Harry-mania, but feel free to substitute Thomas Pynchon, US Magazine, or whatever subway reading you stow away on a Saturday afternoon). In this regard, the writers in Series 1 who successfully achieved this task (Series 2 has already begun) were those that used the pool as a stand-in for some other quasi-dangerous natural setting. These include quicksand (with the actors moving slowly and steadily away from the shallow end), an unknown stretch of the ocean where ship passengers are stranded, and - for by far the kookiest, most plotless and shamefully entertaining bit, Brian MacInnis Smallwood’s “Der Eisbar” – the Antarctic sea, complete with foam representations of U-boats. Extra silliness points also to writer Janet Zarecor for postulating the concept of a drunken guardian angel in her short, titled “Forgiveness.”

Perhaps it is not quite a coincidence that in those plays where the pool is just that – a hotel pool – the stories resemble an NYU student’s Dramatic Writing homework, utterly subordinate to the constraints of the exercise, laden with a few heavy-handed clichés more likely to sink than swim (OK, I promise I’ll stop with the literal metaphors…it’s just too easy!)

But wait; really, what are we here for anyway? Justifiably light-hearted entertainment awaits those willing to use the power of their imagination… while everyone else can go bake their brains out as the sun sets.

Post-Genre and Other Isms
Present, Future and Past (in that order!)

What: Opus 21 Concert, VOX, Wall to Wall Opera
Location: Symphony Space, The Skirball Center
Date: 4/28/2007; 5/12/07; 5/19/07
Cost: $15, Free and Free!
Bohemian Factor: medium, high, and low (once again, in that order)
Geek Factor: N/A (music geeks in full force; other kinds - too dilute to say...)

Oh, how quickly time flies!

Alas, due to lack of time and lack of space, I can only comment briefly on some of my activities the last month, nearly all of them classical music related. For those of us with yen for contemporary music, and/or opera, May was a good month!

First off was Opus 21’s concert celebrating the minimalist tradition at Symphony Space, which has been needled by the press of late (TimesSelect prevents me from putting the link here, but look for the April 27th article by Dan Wakin) for its lack of identity. But I, for one, believe the upper west side cultural venue does indeed occupy a unique niche – it fuses the quirky with the intellectual in a way that even extends even to its bar menu, which features both sliders and scallops (Plus, how many multipurpose arts centers even have a bar menu? As much as I love ya, HERE arts center, the loss of the café – loung-y area is still felt dearly.)

There’s been a lot of minimalism fanfare these days, given Steve Reich’s recent birthday bashes, but the Opus 21 event, showed that there’s still plenty of appetite for surveying the genre. Particularly for those of us who are enthusiasts but not experts in modern music, the concert was an easy mini course in the ways that the tenants of minimalism can be adhered to with draconian rigor, or – especially with some of the more recent composers- a little creative embellishment. Minimalism in its purest state generally means constant repetition of simple motifs, lots of reliance on steady rhythmic beats, and only gradual changes in harmony and tempo. As a rejection of some of the atonal music coming out of the Ivy Tower in the 60’s and 70’s, minimalism has an obvious crossover appeal to the listeners of pop music because of the prominence of rhythm. These days, composers can put more emphasis on emotional expressivity and still hang their work under the minimalist umbrella. (Composer Dennis DeSantis, whose work “One Trick Pony” premiered during the evening summed it up best when he quipped “We’re like post-genre now, but that’s cool.”)

Bill Ryan’s Rapid Assembly and Louis Andriessen’s Klokken voor Haarlem (a New York premiere), made a more persuasive case than others that multiple ideas and textures can be interwoven into the same piece without violating the basic tenants of minimalism, or turning it into its high-baroque opposite. I particularly liked Richard Adams’ “Free Fall.” The founder of Opus 21 created a melodic line that steadily accelerates, as its title suggests, that makes for a compelling listen that ultimately rises above its underlying gimmick.

But it was of course, the master himself that reminded us that there was plenty of complexity to be hand in a simple concept. Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, for one clarinet, played by Bradley Wong, riffing with multiple other clarinets on an amplified recording, was breathtaking in its virtuosity (and showed how undervalued that instrument can be – a wind instrument with sex appeal, who’d a thunk it?)

It was written in 1988, too early to be post-genre, and yet still very cool.

Later in May was City Opera’s VOX Festival, which gives opera composers the chance to hear a 15 minute excerpt of their work performed with a full orchestra and first-rate singers. I’d be a little wary of gauging the future of the art form from this roster alone. The four excerpts I caught were all engaging, but compelling musical ideas, performed in a concert staging, can be misleading when it comes to ascertaining what will work well dramatically when the context is a fully staged opera. Canadian composer Brian Current’s Airline Icarus, a sort of oratorio generated by the passengers of an airline flight, was absolutely riveting, musically speaking, but I wondered what kind of staging would keep the action – a series of interior monologues – moving along in a fully realized production. (Plus, who among us hasn’t felt a tragedy of epic proportions unfolding when relegated to coach on a delayed flight surrounded by crying children?) Similarly, The Rat Land, Gordon Beeferman’s ode to family dysfunction in suburbia (is there any other kind?) was more radical in terms of the palate of sounds, but even that looked like Mozart compared with The Endings by Jenny O. Johnson and John Zorn’s La Machine De L’Etre. The former, based on Phillip Pullman’s novels, invoked the ethereal through such devices as musicians running their fingers around the rims of bowls. Unsurprisingly, it came with a (obscure, artsy) video accompaniment, confirming my suspicions that staging such a piece with traditional theatrical devices would be impossible. But the human imagination is capable of quite a bit without the aid of any technological assistance at all, as demonstrated by soprano Kiera Duffy’s Olympian solo in the Zorn piece, which was based not on a literary or film source, but on a drawing created by theatrical revolutionary (and bad boy of the avant garde Antonin Artaud) when living in an asylum. Fans of the downtown music scene were happy to find no shortage of genre bending virtuosity and just plain weirdness, (Weirdness in a good way!). And that the otherworldly and ethereal can be generated entirely without resorting to grainy video.

Although not all the singers at Wall to Wall Opera (Yes, Symphony Space again) were top notch, it seems downright curmudgeonly to hold it against this warm fuzzy event, which smartly divided up its grab bag of arias by periods in history. I attended the middle section (1750-1950, conveniently encompassing Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, Strauss and Wagner) with a few more contemporary items thrown in. Kudos to the programmers for including, in one instance, an excerpt from the new opera “Margaret Garner” based on a Toni Morrison novel, amid a sea of chestnuts to instill some appetite for the new in an otherwise conservative crowd. The New York City Opera Orchestra Orchestra was in fine form, the audience was enthusiastic, forgiving, and ready to turn everything into a love-fest especially when one baritone (But who? How I wish I had saved the program) brought down the house with his rendition of “Largo al factotum della città” , and impresario-conductor Gerald Steichen managed to keep everything fast-paced and charming even when he had to prompt soloists for their names while introducing them. The format also made it easy to leave and come back whenever one felt like they were overdosing from the intensity. I believe it's a lot easier to make converts when opportunities for the newbies to take breaks are many... Open-house Wagner, anyone?

Universal Appeal
Projection screens and satellite footage give a new dimension to Holst’s “Planets”

What: Kronos + Cosmos
Location: Brooklyn Academy of Music
Date: 4/21/2007
Cost: $17 (with a discount from Science in the City)
Bohemian Factor: healthy
Geek Factor: yes, but glamorous and assimilated (This IS BAM after all)

Was it just last month that I was shooting my mouth off, cautioning against science and art being forced together under the umbrella of an artificial gimmick?

Well, it’s not the first time Arcadia gets to eat her words.

When the Brooklyn Philharmonic performed Gustave Holst’s The Planets with NASA footage of each corresponding planet in the background, I had to admit this is kind of cool.

As part of a program called “Kronos + Cosmos” featuring the Kronos Quartet, the orchestra used the second half of the program to display, on a projection screen, sweeping montages of icy canyons, volcanic mountain ranges, and deceptively-benign looking multicolored clouds. The evening’s narrator was all too game for heightening the astronomy-romantic in all of us, reciting Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and anyone else whose ever quipped a bot mot about the universe, or the very figures from Greek mythology who share their nomenclature with planets.

Following each lyrical paean to humanity, infinity, or some other poetic abstraction, the audience would be reminded that the stunning imagery on the screen was, in fact, swirling tempests of atmospheric goo that would probably kill any of us in nanoseconds after inhaling an overdose of one of the far corners of the periodic table. And even though our brains have already been pre-wired by Hollywood to see some kind of drama, or at least Captain Kirk, with space imagery, the presentation stuck strictly to the satellite footage, a wise choice.

When I did, in fact, roll my eyes, at the supertitles (e.g. “Mars: The Bringer of War”; “Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity”) I realized this was not the Brooklyn Phil’s doing; but the titles bestowed by the composer himself. (Conveniently, there are only 7 numbers, excluding earth and the Pluto, which had yet to become a planet doomed for demotion).

Constant reminders of the extreme temperatures by that too-effusive narrator (“That’s right, it looks pretty, but temperatures are actually NEGATIVE FIVE HUNDRED FARENHEIGHT this far out from the sun.”) were perhaps intended to stoke the kind of awe harbored by 8 year olds on a planetarium field trip. Furthermore, the camera work would speed up and slow down with the tempos of the music, another thing that should have set off my Code Orange cheesiness alert, but instead, turned me into a very enthusiastic 8-year-old. Clearly, I went to too many geeky Omnimax shows as a child. (Does anyone remember “Ring of Fire?”) This, I think, must be the cosmological equivalent of exoticism. If I had any musicologist friends I would ask them if there were any pentatonic scales- usually associated with the “exotic” far east in the music of Puccini - in Holst.

The menu also included a piece by Vaughn-Williams: “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,” and Julia Wolfe’s new piece, written right after 9/11: “Silent Scream” (Wolfe is one of the co-founders of the new music institution, Bang on a Can). Given that we were up in the cheap seats of BAM’s Gilman Opera house, I was impressed by how clearly each section of the orchestra could be heard so high up.

As more and more orchestras use visual imagery to reach out to a younger, hipper demographic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s offering was – in comparison to the most blatantly commercial of those efforts – a highly enjoyable, if not the most organic, synthesis of technology and old-fashioned entertainment; Holst himself may have been thinking of ancient mysteries and mythological figures when he wrote the piece – more Joseph Campbell than Gene Roddenberry- but the end result is some great PR for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Sing Theory
Efforts to combine multicultural musings, pseudo-philosophy and theoretical physics into an opera leads to some unfortunate situation calculus.

What: Preview of New Operas at the Manhattan School of Music
Location: Greenfield Hall at the MSOM campus
Date: 3/18/2007
Cost: $15
Bohemian Factor: eh.
Geek Factor: Music geeks present, though rather well integrated.

I love physics. I love opera. Each of these fields attracts their own spectrum of followers in the world of geekdome. I don’t actually believe there’s any deep quality that organically binds these two interests together, although no doubt they both elicit affection from those who see intellectual inquiry and epicurean passion as two sides of the same coin… but that’s mere speculation on my part.

When the two are combined, the results can be sublime or, well, unfortunate.

As incorporating science into the performing arts becomes trendier and trendier, I find the best results take place when art showcases the grand and obsessive passions that have surrounded the most important discoveries of our time, rather than attempting to lecture an audience that can better pursue scientific pedagogy in other places.

One such performance-cum-lecture took place when the Manhattan School of Music presented “From Page to Stage,” a series of new opera previews from Encompass New Opera Theatre and American Opera Projects. The former presented several scenes from “The Theory of Everything,” apparently the brainchild of the company's artistic director and the opera’s librettist and director.

Really, I have to let this one speak for itself:

• In 1987, I read an article in The New York Times about an astounding new physics theory postulating the simultaneous existence of at least ten dimensions, known as superstring theory. Pushing the envelope of the mind to embrace multiple dimensions, sister universes, and the possibility that everything from our bodies to the farthest star, is made up of vibrating strings, fascinated me.
• During this time... I read metaphysical literature, Eastern philosophy, science, and poetry. Turkey was one of the places that resonated deeply within me, the ancient city of Ankara with its Hittite Museum, and Istanbul...
  
• Upon returning home, it came to me in the middle of the night: Act I, Scene 1, a Planetarium. Thus began The Theory of Everything...A series of dramatic events catapult a scientific and metaphysical search into other dimensions and alternate universes

If you are starting to have doubts as soon as you get to the phrase "Pushing the envelope of the mind" to say nothing of Turkey, then perhaps you share my encouragement to all would-be artists who have artistic revelations “in the middle of the night” to take a good, hard look at the idea in the morning. Yes, Turkey is great, ten dimensions are dandy, but by the time Dominic Inferrera’s Brazilian professor was singing about an obscure tribe in Peru that “sees the universe as a seamless web of interconnected threads” in a freshman physics lecture, I was thinking about how nice it would be to hear that lovely voice take on Mozart’s “La Ci Darem La Mano" instead. (It also reminded me, perhaps somewhat mean-spiritedly, of a Tom Stoppard play when a character asks, "Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing `When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you." )

As our Brazilian professor explains how holograms work and gets into trouble with the school's administrators for imparting holistic gobbledygook to young minds instead of Newton’s laws (C'mon people, didn't they show “Dead Poets Society” in Brazil?) I couldn't help but root for the bad guy when someone sang back “You sound like a cult follower.”

If it makes your eyes role during the actual singing, it probably is not good subject material for an opera.

Happily, “The Summer King” and “The Golden Gate” had more promise. But while the composers and librettists are gifted, and the Manhattan School of Music’s young voices agile, lovely and game for the experiment they were taking part in, the short vignettes seemed dramatically skewed out of context. The former is about one of the first African-American baseball stars, but the character that inspired the story seemed to have no sung role, leaving the audience with only the melodic company of various narrators assuring us of his awesome gifts (Guess you had to be there). The Golden Gate, a sort of San Francisco/Generation X version of Pushkin's novel “Eugene Onegin” is entirely narrated….not really ever a good idea in opera, in which too much ironic distance can amount to ridiculousness. Good humored, overpopulated with someone’s idea of yuppie-hipsters, and sporting enough casual hook-ups to assure us of its modernity, I wasn’t convinced there was any single conflict that really deserved the audience’s emotional investment. (Not atypical of the lyrics, but a keeper nonetheless: “It’s a Waste/To be Chaste.” I'm sure it sounds more poetic in Russian)

“Well,” said the evening’s moderator, attempting to identify the key ingredient that will bring youth into the country’s opera houses. “Opera should be about fun!”

Happily, one of the artists meekly amended:

“Actually, I think opera is about passion.”

I don’t doubt what Peter Gelb would say.

Feather-Brains & Galleristas
An outdoor pillowfight and an indoor art exhibit focusing on California offer ways to warm up from February's bitter winds.

What: NewMindSpace's Pillowfight and LA Art
Location: Union Square and the Metropolitan Pavilion
Date: 2/24/2007
Cost: Pillowfight is free; LA Art is $10
Bohemian Factor: Through the roof at the pillow fight; only the most well-to-do Bohemians at the art exhibition/sale.
Geek Factor: Ditto

Stress, travel, deadlines….and repeat! Two weeks ago, when – over the course of 14 days I had been in Istanbul, Prague, New York, Minneapolis…and back to New York again…I found myself waking one early Saturday morning on wondering exactly which time zone it was.

Vowing to make the most out of the weekend, despite jet lag and yet another deadline, I was able to take a detour at one of a squillion art exhibitions that are taking over lower Manhattan: “LA Art in New York” in the Metropolitan Pavilian, and, at an admission price of $10, one of the less expensive ones, small enough to see most of in an hour or so. (More about that to follow)

In case that wasn’t enough procrastination, however, NewMindSpace was there to save the day with another one of their Pillow Fights at Union Square. While there hasn’t exactly been a scarcity of such impulses to revert to childhood, it was nice-in contrast to last fall’s event – to let the feathers fly without any hyper-eroticized pictures of naked women or the pressure to remain poised in the presence of SoHo’s glitterati (and really, who wants to stay composed in a pillow fight, anyway?)

While the demographic was definitely a younger crowd (more NYU backpacks than one can shake a pillow at) I was greatly bemused to find that the groups on either side of me were speaking German, respectively, and Russian. If they were indeed tourists, I couldn’t help but think the event captures an aspect of NYC that is rarely accessible to visitors on their way to the more costly Manhattan circus attractions of SoHo, Empire State Building, Broadways Show, ad nauseam.

I can't begin to wonder what unknowing pedestrians might have concluded, glimpsing small tempests of feathers whirling around outside the Union Square Whole Foods for the rest of the day.

But some stories are better told visually, so:








The vendors at LA Art hadn’t traveled nearly as far, but certainly had commerce on the brain. Outside of the convenience of being able to view trendy young artists not far from me for free in the Chelsea galleries, I find the overheated art market interesting primarily because of the personality types it has tossed together in the usual Manhattan stew of hedge fund managers, dealers, hipster MFA graduates, publicists and Park Avenue old money. The influx of California art-types made the whole mélange just more interesting, and made for some interesting people-watching in addition to art viewing. (The conversations between locals looking to expand their collections, and LA gallery owners was endlessly instructive, often beginning with social niceties on east coast vs. west coast cultures, and then diving delicately into matters of the artist’s talents, their soon-to-be-soaring careers, and of course, money.)

For better or worse, I was just there to avoid getting sucked in to such transactions, with the exception of a few owners kind enough to chat about an artist and answer questions, while recognizing –without batting an eyelash – that, I did not have the look or the talk of a potential buyer. (I barely even remember what “formalism” is, truth be told) Should I ever find myself graduating from non-profiteer to a profession where I might have actual purchasing power, this is who I would keep my eye on:

Though none of her buyers may be able to pronounce her name, the “absorbent ground” technique of Iva Gueorguieva introduced translucent swirls, spatters, tendrils and waves that could be either a sea of psychological suggestions, for those who like to see abstract art as a Rorschach test, and a feast for the eye for those would rather not go there. Equally adventurous in throwing everything – literally – into the kitchen sink when it comes to color, texture and form were the loopy sculptures of Lynn Aldrich, made out of garden hoses, sponges, scrubbers and various cleaning instruments.

I’m not sure what an “archival pigment photo” is, but the haunting images of tree stumps captured by Amir Zaki gave me the willies, speaking of psychological suggestion.

Peter Rogier’s lemon-yellow “Broadway” was an attention grabber, and I could tell I was not the only one he wondered how that dancing man depicted managed to defy gravity, being made from polyester, iron and polyurethane varnish, whatever that is.

This being LA, it made sense that there was a lot of multimedia-digital-ish items, art inspired by comic strips and cartoons, and heavy use of text and lettering. Raphael Lazano-Hemmer’s “Extremities” made interesting use of security cameras; Charlie Roberts’ “Tall Tale” had even the most icily distant buyers stopping in their tracks to figure out what the story was all about, a banjo player on some kind of lusty adventure in a mythical Americana; and the work of Jorge Mendez Blake, which - though not one for aesthetics- certainly knows how to create a despairing image in the viewers mind.

The sloping letters on his work “And Over He Went” state:
“But for all his efforts
he could not get his
balance & over he went”

I know the feeling, Jorge. It’s good to know there’s angst west of the Mississippi.

The Persistance of Revelry
Apparently, time is not of the essence when Dali, a DJ, and plenty of alcohol await.

What: The Guggenheim's First Friday
Location: The new El Greco to Picasso exhibit
Date: First Friday of the month, starting again in February of 2007
Cost: $20
Bohemian Factor: not a one to be had on 86th street
Geek Factor: occasionally found reading the biographical blurbs on the walls and taking notes

The adage that "Time is money" is particularly salient in New York, where everyone is always short on the former and wants more of the latter, and where everyone's choice of neighborhood, real estate and transportation depends on their own private interpretation of what that stale platitude really means, anyway.

For me, I discovered, it means I am willing to pay $20 and 2 hours and 45 minutes of my time to see the new Guggenheim exhibit "El Greco to Picasso," accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack and lots of good-looking sybarites checking each other out. I had this moment of revelation at 11:45 pm during last December's trendier-than-thou "First Friday" event, as an otherwise balmy day gave rise to frigidly cold winds and an excruciatingly long wait loosened the resolve of my accomplices to celebrate a friend's birthday under the cross-eyed gaze of Picasso's "Woman Ironing."

Having decided that $20 bucks was just not worth it for the sole hour of remaining exhibit viewing/partying time, my friends decided it was time to abscond for a Second Avenue bar nearby. But my feet refused to budge from the line (though long periods of time in uncomfortable shoes tend to do this to me). After slowly making progress towards the fifth avenue entrance, waiting in a long line that snaked deceitfully around Madison, the collective will had weakened. While initially intrigued by the onslaught of glammed up young things arriving by the taxi-load (and ugly-SUV-limo load) it was clear we were just plebes in the eyes of the watchful museum security, who seemed to open those coveted doors only to Guggenheim members, waiting in their own, much faster moving queue on the South side. Beware of that "members only" line- it routinely raises false hopes among first-time arrivals, who make the frequent mistake of waiting in the wrong place.

Actually there was no need to venture all the way to Second Avenue for alcohol: the high-heeled, tiny-pursed revelers and their scruffy-shaven companions had already discovered that the endless wait could be made more entertaining by sending a representative down to any Lexington avenue liquor store, and bring something back for all to covertly share. Strangely, drinking from brown paper bags in the cold didn't seem a particularly attractive birthday celebration, and I soon found myself the only one unwilling to cut my losses after already giving up 2 hours and 15 minutes. I felt that the hours I had logged, feeling crabby and windblown, were an investment I could only recoup with my promised hour of art viewing, dancing, and social anthropology.

Fortunately, S was willing to wait out that last half hour with me, literally only about ten feet from the entrance, waiting for two more people to leave. Numb, though thawed by the bright lights and a sea of wiggling bodies, we grabbed free drinks and made our way up the Guggenheim spiral. The space really is uncannily suitable for such network-y events; if one is not that interested in reading about the evolution of cubism and too shy to jump into the oxygen-less dance floor, the activity of choice seems to be leaning over the balcony, and gazing passively at the attractive faces visible from above and below. From the very highest level, the bodies of the dance floor became hypnotically abstract, dangerously reeling in the types of people who get sidetracked by their screensavers.

S and I managed to partake in all three activities, in addition to enjoying some Spanish painters I had never heard of, despite the occasional displays of PDA that occasionally obstructed the view (despite the growing numbers of those rotunda voyeurs, it were the couples and groups that that had arrived joined at the hip who firmly were in control of the evening). And apparently lingering too long, although minding our own business, near the dance floor invited some unsolicited attention. A middle-aged man shared his own thoughts as to "which guys are the cutest," and generously advised us as to whom we should be hitting on. Finding his comments mildly sketchy, we decided to chalk our remaining gallery time strictly to art appreciation; given there were only ten minutes left, we still needed to recoup our investment.

A Series of Unfortunately Belated Theatrical Events
Original, uneven downtown silliness (Is there any other kind?) is reported on too late, sadly

What: Theatre of Science
The Obstruction Plays
Little Building
Location:
The Tank, Galapagos and Theatre for a New City
Date: November through Five Minutes Ago
Cost: $7 - $18
Bohemian Factor: Healthy
Geek Factor: More on stage than in the audience (particularly Theatre of Science)

It is worth reporting on several quirky theatrical events that register a '10' on the shoestring bohemian-meter…even though they all are, sadly, past. (Bad blogger, I!)

Even those immune to the most self-referential, self-indulgent, self- everything tongue in cheek-ness of downtown theatre were bound to get a chuckle out of Nick Jones "Little Building" playing at Galapagos on Friday nights in November. Given that it is impossible to live in the five boroughs and not have a real estate horror story , there is bound to be some scheudenfreude generated by the eponymous Little Building, who self-destructively harbors unrequited love for a real estate maven. The object of her affection eventually succumbs to that personality disorder so rare to his profession: megalomania. Many of Little Building's peers, encased in the garb of fellow architectural structures, warn her against such an imprudent choice of soulmate, and the dialogue takes full advantage of the goofiness of the premise ("Is that all you are? A man container?")

For more of this sort of thing, check out Jollyship the Whizbang web site, another brainchild of Jones and Raja Azar.

Requiring slightly more generosity of patience, the Slant Theatre's Five Obstruction Plays borrows Lars Von Trier's device, by challenging five playwrights to construct short one-acts based on five obstructions, decided upon by other playwrights. The issuers in this case include Lee Blessing, new MacArthur recipient Sarah Ruhl and Naomi Izuka. In contrast to the most restrictive kind of constraints found in the Von Trier movie, these are a little looser in constraints; more akin to a beginner's creative writing exercises. Given its downtown audience and the fact that writers Lisa Kron ("Well" "2.5 Minute Ride") are writing other projects while concurrently tackling their obstruction plays, this is probably a good thing. Though it was a shame that Dan O'Brien cheats a bit when informed by Izuka that his play "must take place in a drawer." Kron fares better, with a charming though feather-light piece, though Marcus Gardley is the first playwright who aspires towards some kind of profundity, despite the inevitable pathos of writing about a California hustler in search of his birth father. But as always, the best is left for last. That the nearly wordless play will be wonderfully weird and not easy to decipher is evident about reading the cast list, Man Holding Diet Coke. (It also has the unfair advantage of being directed by Steve Cosson, the Civilians ringleader) Splendid ensemble work, sexual jealousy, and Cher are all to follow. The author? Mat Smart, the event's impresario.

For more of this sort of thing, check out Slant Theatre Project web site.

Lastly, as proven once again by Sharper Image catalogs and the latest Hugh Jackman movie The Prestige, the pseudo-threatening spectacle of electric currents gone amok always holds infinite commercial appeal. Theatre of Science presenters Simon Singh, a physicist and science writer, and Richard Weisman, a magician and psychologist, have put together a sort of benign collection of parlor tricks. The grand climax are some very noisy six plus foot bolts of lightning generated by two transformer coils, with the perpetual reminders of the destructive potential of such an apparatus (threats that seemed a little melodramatic, given that this had been marketed as a family show). Some general introductions were given to Big Bang Theory, incorporating an endearing example of an incandescent pickle. The show also featured a contortionist, whose physiology-defying feats were both a marvel and an appetite suppressant, for those of us sensitive types who are used to associating the unholy stretching of limbs and joints with dismemberment and accidents (even more intriguing to me was the soundtrack used for this portion of the show, which apparently had been generated, in some way, from MRI machines). There is no effort made to make Big Bang and contortionists cohere; the greater purpose seems to be to instill an appreciation for the showmanship and sensual appeal of scientific inquiry. And it seems to be working: despite the warning's of "Don't try this at home," my companions, two science-minded Columbia grad students enthusiastically reported later that the pickle-igniting feat could be easily replicated within one's own home. Hmm, if only the NIH might begin soliciting grant requests on other matters of vegetable-based radiation…

For more of this sort of thing, check out Science in the City, the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as Simon Singh's home page.