notanotherbookreview

WHERE DO ALL THE GHOSTS GO ?  Theater for the New City  ( Written and directed by Barbara Kahn , ) opens with a rapier thrust by Sarah Bernhardt ( Steph Van Vlack ). a ghost in   Napoleonic drag. She thinks herself condemned to solitude in the derelict hotel, until Marcel Duchamp with his transparent chessboard shows up. Played with droll astringency by David Leeper, his verbal provocations are interrupted by fellow ghouls Elizabeth Keckley, a   demure companion to Mary Todd Lincoln ( Chloe Simone Crawford ). Then Buffalo Bill Cody ( Christopher Lowe) crashes into the room. When Duchamp purposes chess, you get that he and Cody may have been playing an infinite game. When the Baroness ( Sarah Teed ) floats through the room and Duchamp dramatically calls her a thief, it's but a ripple in her trajectory through time with a bright scarf. It is a scarf, ostensibly lost, that brings Jos ( Ashley Versher ) and her wife, Frankie ( Fleur Voorn ) to return to the de...

There's been a fashion of  professional theater performed in apartments but until this HAMLET, I hadn't experienced this. A real surprise  how unexpectedly alive and vital this production was in an intimate chair-filled livingroom where actors and spectators were on the same level. This wasn't experimental as much as a classic restored to the bones of what's essentially a family play--dysfunctional to be sure but a moving discovery in this audacious show. The lead (Melissa Nelson) is a young woman, who looked like a Danish boy yet within minutes commanded with a rational self-possession that trumped her torment. Despite the many cries of "Madness!" and her circumlocutions of language, you question that charge. Relentless as any prosecutor, Hamlet investigates her stepfather and mother, accused by her father's ghost. Though you know the stages of her investigation, the process and outcome, this performance, rational and impassioned, is riveting. A...