“When is the last time you went to live theater like this”? I asked one of the seven other audience members waiting for Voyeur to begin, an hour-long play that takes place in the streets and landmarks of Greenwich Village.
He shouted angrily at me through his face mask. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, so I just stood there awkwardly.
“He’s saying to stay six feet away,” the woman by his side interpreted helpfully.
We were standing together where we had been told to congregate on this busy Friday night on this crowded street in the Village, distinguished from everybody else by the sticker we wore from Bated Breath Theatre. I was pretty sure I was already six feet away – I’ve been keeping that distance from people for seven months – but I backed up a few more steps.
Judging by his antisocial response to my question, it had been a while for him. I understood the fear. Until two weeks ago, I had only “attended” online theater in the more than six months since Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down New York’s theaters in mid-March. But Voyeur was one of four live, in-person works of theater I’ve seen in the past two weeks – all of them comparatively modest, all different from one another, but all of them restorative.
With The Broadway League announcing last Friday that the shutdown of Broadway will remain at least until May 30, 2021, it may be surprising that there is any theater to go to in New York at all. But a reduction in the rate of coronavirus infections that has resulted in a relaxation of certain state-wide restrictions has allowed some companies to present some cautious productions — with other, larger flexible theaters reportedly hoping to follow suit.
The first show I attended was a matinee entitled Different Shades of Comedy, a reading of two old one-act plays and actor Tony Roberts reading from his memoir. It was indoors, at Theatre 80 in the East Village, but there were only eight audience members spread out in a theater that seats 160; a paramedic hired for the occasion took our temperature; we wore masks and signed waivers. Perhaps I was too conscious of the situation to enjoy this first outing, but I not only found little to laugh about, I started thinking: Maybe I’ve gotten so used to online theater that I’ve outgrown the old-fashioned kind. But then the show ended and the eight of us applauded, and the sound suddenly made me realize – that’s what I’ve been missing; that’s what I can’t give up forever.
Different Shades of Comedy was the third, in-person show during the pandemic put on by the twenty-year-old company Food for Thought Productions, which started their monthly matinees in July, when the city entered “phase four” of its reopening (which includes “low risk indoor arts and entertainment.”) The productions have been for a very small in-house audience, simultaneously livestreamed on Zoom. In a sign of the upside-down world we’re in, the company charged $25 to watch the Zoom, but it was free to attend in person. The next one, on October 19, promises Here We Are by Dorothy Parker and excerpts from the work of Lynn Nottage.
Emboldened, a few days later I attended Random Acts, a solo autobiographical play by Renata Hinrichs that’s being performed every Sunday afternoon in October in the backyard of the Cell Theater on 23rd Street in Chelsea. Thirteen audience members, masked and socially distanced, sat outdoors for a lovely performance enhanced not just by the beautiful sounds of audience laughter and applause, but also by the pleasant smell of a wood-burning fireplace emanating from an unseen chimney, the light touch of the occasional early Autumn leaf, the cool taste of the crisp air.
Static Apnea, which runs through October 17, was the most challenging of the live, in-person shows I’ve attended. The challenge was not because of its content, although it is decidedly avant-garde – a solo show that takes place in a converted shipping crate that last only nine minutes and two seconds long, the exact time that marks the record for a woman to hold her breath underwater (which is the definition of static apnea.)
Avant-garde is familiar to any committed New York theatergoer. And the challenge was not to my safety. The actress was performing behind a glass plate in the crate. What was challenging was how to get to the theater, which is in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. I decided to walk there, which took 90 minutes, and featured a theatrical view of the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, and the Brooklyn Bridge as I crossed over the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian path to Brooklyn. I decided, after the show, to take the New York City subway back, for the first time in eight months, which was theatrical in a different way: An unmasked bongo player and storyteller entered my car unbidden, and declaimed loudly and rhythmically.
Voyeur, which is running several times a day at least through November 7, takes advantage of some of this natural theatrical energy in New York to create a work that I found clever and enjoyable. It was certainly the most labor-intensive of the four; there are almost twice as many cast members as theatergoers for each performance. A few minutes after my non-conversation with my fellow theatergoer, a violinist started playing in front of us, followed by an accordion player, and Toulouse Lautrec himself – portrayed by a puppet.
Voyeur is subtitled “The Windows of Toulouse Lautrec,” and was inspired by the Bated Theater Company’s long-running site-specific work Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec. That show was performed on the second floor of a bar on Houston Street aptly named Madame X, designed to look like the kind of 19th century bordello where the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec hung out. The artist was “a voyeur,” according to one of three posters hung on the gate of Christopher Park where we had been told to gather. “The subjects of his art were often those around him – dancers, prostitutes and their customers. He even lived in brothels with the women…”
On cue, the four-story building directly across Christopher Street suddenly lit up, with performers gaudily dressed as prostitutes waving seductively, one from each window. Twenty-first century Greenwich Village became 19th century Montmartre as we were led on a walking tour of one vivid scene after another: a woman doing a striptease in a store window on Greenwich Avenue, but the only thing she’s stripping off is her bejeweled face mask; another woman dressed all in white on a traffic island on Sixth Avenue – parasol, face mask, hoop dress, which seemed to be housing another person underneath, although this could have been a trick of shadow puppetry; a couple holding up a picture frame on Eighth Street, as if they are a living painting, throwing one of us a red rose, and then dancing around the corner to MacDougal Street, where they freeze in a doorframe; a man with a lantern handing us candles, and leading us through Washington Square Park, to Judson Memorial Church, where we climb an endless staircase full of Toulouse-Lautrec illustrations, until we land on a balcony that has been outfitted as his art studio, Below, a statuesque, white-garbed performer of uncertain gender dances ballet beneath a video of the painter.
One of the most spectacular aspects of Voyeur is that it was so integrated into the crazy scene of the Village on a Friday night that it was difficult to know which was a creation of the company. Along Eighth Street, there was a forlorn-looking woman sitting alone inside a small brightly-lit art gallery; was she part of the show? At the church, the classical music climaxed with a shrieking siren; was that deliberate, or a passing fire engine? The inebriated party-goers, and the maze of café tables with dividers and sneeze guards and Christmas lights filling the sidewalks and the streets that we passed by; was that part of Voyeur? Whichever. We were one with Toulouse-Lautrec; by taking in this whole scene, we had become the character of the title.
“That was the first live theater I’ve been to in six months!” a fellow theatergoer said to me outside the church. (A different theatergoer.) We talked enthusiastically about what specifically we had liked, two no-longer complete strangers masked and six feet apart, but now tied together by theater.
Tickets for Voyeur are available through November 7, 2020.
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