Morning Thoughts on The Amphitheater Of My Dreams

Often, the dreams I remember best are the ordinary ones. Entirely too often, my unconscious entertains my sleeping self with images of commuting, so that when I wake in the morning, I feel like I just got off an eight hour subway ride. (That's where Bronx Bound​ came from, I think.) Sometimes this is stressful, sometimes its fun. Last night it was a blast, as I dreamt I was riding the subway all over town to meet a buddy of mine, and kept bumping into fun people from high school. The transit details were  accurate in a way they usually aren't—no dragons in the conductor's booth here—right down to a dramatic moment as we rode the F train around the bend at the Smith Ave/9th Street stop.

I looked out the window and saw an amphitheater in Gowanus—a slightly run down, wood-and-steel bandshell, with seats for maybe eighty people and a stage appropriate for theater and film. It was a grey night, and the crowd was mostly empty—that the place was located underneath the train tracks probably didn't help—but I defended the theater to my friends. "Go there on a hot summer night," I said, "and it's the best place to watch theater in New York."​

I woke up sorry it wasn't real. There are a few excellent performance spaces in the area around the Gowanus canal, but because the neighborhood was until quite recently a fetid stinkpot, there are few places to be entertained outdoors. (Gowanus Grove is a notable exception. I've thought about going a few times, but have never seen the point of paying a $10 cover to stand around outside. You can do that for free in parks.) And aside from the beleaguered Brooklyn Lyceum, there are no grand stages anywhere in the neighborhood. This imaginary amphitheater solves all those problems.

Programming would be confined to summer months. If we had heat lamps, maybe we could stretch it into the fall. In a typical week, we'd have one or two plays running in rep, with film screenings on weekend nights and matinees during the day. We could have concerts, late night dance parties—anything and everything to piss off the neighbors and draw tourists from North Brooklyn. There would be a bar in the front, obviously, and enough artisan lightbulbs and distressed iron to earn us two or three Times​ style section gushes—"Hipster Theater, Under The Summer Sky"—in the first month of programming. It wouldn't take long for this to become a warm-weather institution, where people come for the party, stay for the theater, and never even notice that they're enjoying a marginal art form.

​All I need to make this work is a lot of money and a decade or two experience running a performing arts space. Until the Brooklyn gods smile down on this project, I'll have to content myself by hoping to return to my amphitheater in my dreams. Tonight I hope I visit it on a rainy night, when the canvas tarp has been run out, and the audience is huddled together, intent on the performance, rain in the background and the Gowanus Canal oozing along just a few blocks away.

Baldwin Reminds Shia, "I'm Not Your Fucking Chief"

The still-simmering Alec Baldwin/Shia LaBeouf feud is starting to mesmerize me—mostly because it's not really a feud. It's like a nerdy kid is trying to pick a fight with the captain of the football team, and Mr. QB Handsome has to keep telling ​him to back down before he gets hurt. Today, for no reason at all, LaBeouf released some new emails. Once again, they're more puzzling than enlightening, and they seem to make him look bad. The highlight:

Baldwin: “We start Monday. But I’m so fucking tired.”

LaBeouf: “I’m a hustler. I don’t get tired. I’m 26, chief.”

Baldwin: “Listen, boy. I’m not your fuckin’ chief. You got that? Ha. Hahahahaha. Let’s go.”

What does this tell us about the creative process of famous actors? Nothing. But it’s a nice reminder that most actors are children at heart, incapable of letting someone else have the last word. Shia LaBeouf is clearly not cut out from Broadway, and it was good of him to quit the show as soon as he realized that. Remember—he didn’t force these producers to cast him. They picked him for the sake of name recognition, and nothing more. If he’s being excoriated for cutting and running, I think it’s because the critical establishment feels like it’s been cheated out of a pan.

And Alec Baldwin? Well, I’m happy to see that in private email conversations, he’s just as crazy as I like to imagine. If LaBeouf thinks he can turn New York against Baldwin with screenshots of fairly innocuous emails, he’s proved something I’ve long said about film actors. A job that requires you to work for no more than 45 seconds at a time does not do much for your capacity for critical thought.

​I've got more on the "feud" as a whole over at Bullett​. Check it out, fella.

One of Brooklyn's Finest Theaters Faces The Abyss

I wrote last fall about an Ugly Rhino production at the Brooklyn Lyceum, a onetime public bathhouse on Fourth Avenue, in Park Slope.​ The last performances of that play—a Halloween spectacular complete with booze, dancing and 1970's sleaze—were cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Now, the theater itself faces something far more daunting: bankruptcy.

For the last few weeks, theater owner Eric Richmond has been proclaiming doom. After more than two decades of ownership, he has run into serious debt, and could be foreclosed upon as early as this month. I live around the corner from the theater, and thought of seeing it go dark makes my heart hurt. God knows how Richmond must feel.

In a February memo to supporters, he wrote that the Lyceum, "has always been a work in progress."

The fees from rentals and admission barely covered the cost of basic maintenance and the electricity to run the building.  All the infrastructure work—including the creation of new theater spaces—came out of sweat equity or cash raised from the mortgage. (That of course is part of the legal dispute.)

My goal was to make this tremendous hulk of a space available to striving artists. Many people have appreciated the Lyceum’s roughhewn beauty. Some wanted a more polished space, but that is kind of a Catch-22: maybe that desired space would not be affordable.  We were/are a big wreck of a building that gets better each year.

That wreck could be facing the wrecking ball. Well, not literally—you can't just go around tearing down landmarked buildings. But the space's future as a theater is in doubt. Richmond warns of a culture lover's worst case scenario: that the grandest theater south of Flatbush could be converted to condos or, worse, a Duane Reade.

Tonight came an update, and it is no more rosy. Richmond writes:​

The Lyceum is not closing. The Lyceum, however, is fighting for its very existence. What got us here is subject to much speculation.

Our  current financial problems result largely (but not exclusively) from  legal battles with our former architect, Jean G. Miele, regarding a development deal that encompassed the Lyceum, the lot next door and the development rights shared by both properties. We believe we're victims of price gouging: up to $800,000 in questionable expenses that frustrated our ability to complete the deal and led to our predicament.

Richmond writes with passion, but not clarity. His message has the intensity of someone whose legal troubles have made him an amateur lawyer against his will. I'm not really sure what's going on at the Lyceum, but it doesn't sound good. I hope Richmond is exaggerating, but my gut tells me he's not. I'm going to start looking into it tomorrow. I'll let you know if I learn anything interesting. 

At The Public, An Honored Brit Has The Time Of His Life

The Detroit riot of 1967 started in the wee hours of July 23rd, when police launched what was supposed to be a routine raid on an after-hours club, or "blind pig." Expecting an ordinary late night crowd, they stumbled onto an 82 person party given in honor of two returning Vietnam vets. Rather than back off, the police attempted to arrest the entire group, setting off a five day riot that left forty-three dead.

Yesterday, the Public Theater started previews for Detroit '67, a new play by Dominique Morisseau that begins during the run-up to the riot. A Public Lab production, ​Detroit '67 runs through March 17 before zipping uptown to the Classical Theatre of Harlem, where it will run March 19 to April 14. Set in one of Detroit's blind pigs, it offers political drama by way of family comedy, backed up by the kind of lush Motown soundtrack one would expect from after-hours Detroit. This morning, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Kwame Kwei-Armah, an Englishman who makes his home in Maryland, where he is the artistic director of Baltimore's Center Stage.

What appeals to you about this play?

From page one, I was laughing my head off. By about page four, I wrote a note, "Please don't let this play be bad. I love this." Some plays do that—you read the first half and it's great, and then it all collapses. So first and foremost, the thing that attracted me was the wonderfulness of the script. Without that, there's nothing.

This play asks about why, in Detroit in '67, people reacted the way they did. Why was there this automatic combustion? But more importantly, it is a brother and sister play. One is a dreamer, and the other is a pragmatist, and the play beautifully explores how those tools both hinder or perpetuate one's life.

And it's got music! Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson—this brother and sister have quite the 8-track collection.

Correct! Oh my God. The truth is that we did a couple of workshops and readings of the play before we went into production, and I never used the music, because I didn't want any of us to think that somehow the music can save us. The music is the icing, but the play does 99.9—no, the play does 100% of its own work. I don't want people leaving the theater saying that the music was wonderful. They walked in knowing that the music was wonderful. They need to leave talking about the play that just punched them in the stomach.

And this is going up around the same time as Motown: The Musical. 

Yes! It is, isn't it? And the funny thing is, we share a costume designer.

I saw that you were made an OBE this year. Tell me a little about that, for Americans who might not be familiar with the honor.

Basically, it's the Queen's jubilee honors. Twice a year, the Queen invests and gives honor to people across Britain whose work—it's like your freedom medal, that the President gives. It's not just artists—it's a bit difficult to describe. It's the one they give you before you go to to Sir or Lord, if you continue to be a good boy. At Center Stage, we call it Knight Light.

How did it feel?

Magnificent. It's a tremendous honor. In fact, the day that it was announced in the media, I didn't say anything about it, and I got maybe five hundred hits on Facebook. It made me cry three times. The outpouring of love that I received—everyone should receive that in their lifetime, and not just at their funeral.

Why did Oskar and Mandy think you were right for this?

In Dominique and I's first meeting together, she asked the same question. I threw it back to her, asking, "Are you actually saying, 'Negro, what the hell does your British ass know about Detroit?'" And she laughed at that.

I think the reason is that, as a playwright, I had written a similar play. It's not similar in its dialogue, in its story, in anything that happens in it, but it is similar in theme. Oskar's brilliance is that he said, "I think you know where Detroit '67 is."

Oskar Eustis knows how to put people together.

And what a beautiful combination! I have had the time of my life. We really have developed the play over the course of the year. One of the great things about Dominique—not only is she a wonderful writer, but she's a wonderful rewriter.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but I've had the time of my life. I'm a man of my theater. The Public does ten shows a year. I do seven. So it's not like I don't know what it takes, but I tell you, god the Public is run well. They know how to look after a writer, they know how to look after a director, they know how to look after a play. I've learned a lot, watching them, about how to run my own company.

Anything in particular?

New play development. How one invests in new plays. How one nurtures writers through the process. How one communicates. It's small things, but they made me go, "Uh-huh." Clarity of leadership, and clarity of communication about aims and objectives.

I'm seeing masters at work.

'Szechwan's' Bandleader, On Keeping Brecht Lively

This month's hot ticket has been on Fourth Street, where Taylor Mac is bringing Brecht back to life in the critically lauded Good Person of Szechwan. Rollicking, zany and heartfelt, it is everything we've been told Brecht isn't supposed to be—and it is absolutely marvelous. Although the show is built upon Mac's typically white-hot all-singing, all-dancing performance, Good Person is bolstered by its house band: The Lisps.

A Brooklyn-based band whose instruments include a suitcase full of bells and a built-in washboard, their look is whimsical but their sound has meat. In 2012, they premiered Futurity, a musical of their own. Astor Place Riot spoke this morning with bandleader César Alvarez, about doing musicals yourself, and how to keep Brecht from boring. Good Person of Szechwan runs through February 26th. I suggest bludgeoning whomever you have to in order to secure a ticket.

How did you get attached to this project?

Basically, Taylor Mac is an acquaintance and sort of a hero of mine. They were trying to nail down what they were doing musically with the piece, and Taylor said, "What about César Alvarez, and that band The Lisps?" They were looking for somebody whose musical approach would help them tell the story, but would also be fun and wacky and not quite on the nose. If you read what Brecht said about music in his plays, it's that the music should be its own, standalone thing. 

What's great about having a band doing the music is that we're an autonomous creative unit. We have our own style and approach and performative language, and we bring that to the piece. We're not a pit band—hired guns who show up to play the score—but a creative group that's there alongside, commenting on the story, critiquing it, and enriching it. What's fun about the production is that it's totally wacky and fun and ridiculous, but it's also very Brechtian without being academic.

What do you mean by that?

Brecht is an incredible lion of dramatic writing, and he came up with an entire philosophy of what theater should do. In the translation and canonization of that brilliant idea—of theater as a way to raise the consciousness of humanity—it's become academicized. The usual translation of Brecht's German word—which I'm never gonna say right—is "the alienation effect." [Director] Lear [deBessonet] translates it differently. She translates it as "making strange."

Translating it as "alienation effect" has led people to think that Brecht wants you to alienate your audience. But Brecht was a populist, a fan of vaudeville and silent film and jazz. He wasn't interested in alienating his audience—he just didn't want to hypnotize them. This is Lear's genius—she's figured out a way to take this incredibly dense work, and make it both poignant and relevant, but also really fun to watch.

Between this and your 2012 musical Futurity, The Lisps have gotten very theatrical. How come?

A band can be very insular. We love each other to death, but after seven years, you get sick of working with the same people. When we wrote a musical, we suddenly had twelve new band members!

Now we're a band that's gotten really good at stepping out of our comfort zone. As the MP3 generation takes shape, what you start seeing is bands redesigning themselves for a more collaborative and networked world. As analog as our band is, what we're doing theatrically has everything to do with the fact that it's not enough to just make albums any more. People are searching so desperately for performance, real life experience and three dimensional entertainment, that a lot of bands are starting to reach outside the typical touring and recording format.

It's the best thing we've ever done as a band.

I'm working on a musical right now with a friend of mine who's a musician and a composer. He's never written a musical before—what would you tell him?

My advice is, do everything the opposite of how you think you should. We didn't have any idea how to put on a musical, but we just put it up. Everyone who actually does musicals would say, "Don't do that!"

We just played our musical for our friends, giving us the chance to workshop it in this incredible way. We never played our musical with just a piano, we always had the full band there. That's what helped us get it produced, that we just did it ourselves. 

I'm dying to see a DIY musical culture. When bands and composers and electronic musicians start pulling their music out of the forty minute set in the bar, and start telling a story. How cool would it be if there were an indie musical culture in New York?

The word "musical" carries a lot of baggage. But in the end, it's a deeply American form that's influenced everyone in some way. Everyone's seen musicals. Everyone's seen The Lion King. Everyone was in their high school musical. Even the most disaffected indie kid was in Grease or Hair. The form is much more open than Broadway might have led you to believe.

Are you planning on more musicals?

Right now I'm working on a space musical, which merges the experience of a musical with that of a video game. I'm interested in thinking about how changing technology is going to alter the way we experience musical theater. And we're continuing to work on Futurity, looking towards its New York premiere, which will be imminent.

Hasty Explanation For Radio Silence: A New Play!

My mother always told me that, when cooking for people, to never apologize for the food. If it's bad, don't serve it. But if it's good enough for the table, don't prejudice your guests by saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—the chicken pot pie turned out awful" just before they take their first bite.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you that, except that it's always good advice, but I did want to apologize for the week's silence. I'd like to be able to say that I spent the last seven days on a transcontinental bender, but the real explanation for my uncharacteristic lack of blather has been more ordinary: I've been finishing the rewrite of a new play. 

It's nearly done now, so expect regular updates to resume this afternoon. And if any of you are interested in reading a just-completed comic mystery about murder and mayhem in off Broadway theater, drop me a line.

How Does David Ives Start A Short Play? Quickly

Like some sort of magical flying rabbit, Primary Stages' current revival of All In The Timing is light, fluffy, and will have you home by 10 o'clock. When most Broadway shows threaten to end just before 11 pm, that's a value not to be understated. But that's not all! All In The Timing is simply delightful. Don't believe me? Ask the Times.

Last week, I spoke to director John Rando about what makes this evening of one acts click. Today, the interview ran at Bullett. Right now, you can read it.

As you’ve directed it, All In The Timing rockets past quick enough that the actors barely have a chance to breathe. What makes that speed possible?
David’s writing is so distilled, and so like music. My job is teaching his tempo. It’s a very detailed, specific process, where an actor has to find a through line, find a character, find an emotional reality—and at the same time recognize that the language is heightened and sharp and quick. Being able to do that takes a lot of musicianship from the actors.

This seems like a collection of plays that, directed badly, could fall flat on its face. How did you avoid that?

With David’s short plays, the first twelve lines of the play are the heart of the show. Getting the beginning of the play right—visually and emotionally—makes it all make sense. We’ve got three monkeys sitting around and typing and randomly trying to produce Hamlet. It’s ridiculous. But making that very clear at the very beginning allows the audience to catch up quickly. Because they’re short plays, you don’t have time for exposition. Your exposition’s over before you know it.

I like that. If, after the first twelve lines, you haven't set everything up, you're doing it wrong. David Ives knows. He's a funny guy.

On a related note, am I the only person who's sick of the phrase "an evening of one acts"? I used it above, and I'm not proud of myself. In the intro to the Rando interview, I called it "a clutch of one act comedies." I'm going to keep trying to come up with clever new words for that kind of thing. The day's theme is vocabulariety. You heard it here first. And probably last.

Need A Smile For Your Umbrella? I Know A Guy

Victor Hugo's 1869 melodrama The Man Who Laughs is best-remembered as a story about a smile. Its hero is Gwynplaine, a young boy condemned to a life in the circus after his face is carved into a gruesome, permanent grin. The character, famously played by Conrad Veidt in a 1928 silent film adaptation, is among the influences for Batman's Joker. It is not a long leap from Veidt, to Nicholson, to Ledger.

Through February 24th, the Stolen Chair Theatre Company presents an adaptation of Hugo's story, performed in the manner of a silent film. Completely without dialogue, it tells its story through creative staging, talented acting, and 102 projected title cards. It is not a parody of the genre; it is not a museum piece. Instead, it is one of the loveliest bits of theater New York has seen this year. This afternoon, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Jon Stancato about the Joker, his actors, and the prosthetic that keeps his laughing man smiling.

I saw this play on Saturday, and I haven't been able to get Dave Droxler, who plays Gwynplaine, out of my mind. You guys got really lucky with him, didn't you?

It's kismet. I can't imagine anybody better able to tackle the specific challenges of the role. He can break your heart and make you crack into laughter in the same second. To mimic Gwynplaine's permanent smile, the actor has to wear a prosthetic device which holds his face in that smile position. Stephanie Cox-Williams, our designer, has created a prosthetic that he can wear for ninety minutes. There's been a lot of talk over the years about how to create the Joker character, the man who laughs, and she's done a very good job creating something wearable.

Dave has basically no use of his mouth in the piece. He's without voice, and all of his expression has to come from his eyes and the movement of his body. 

How comfortable is that prosthetic?

I think Dave is a very, very generous soul, in that he tells me it's wearable because he knows I would be kept up nights if he didn't. The first few drafts of it, he would take off the piece, and the smile lines would remain on his face for a few days afterwards. He's such a soldier that he would say no, no, it's okay. But we worked with Stephanie to make sure that wasn't happening as often. The latex scars that run up the sides of his cheek help deflect some of that discomfort. We have a little spray water bottle that he uses to keep himself hydrated between scenes, because he can't close his mouth to drink. 

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I think he really, really enjoys the challenge that this creative limitation gives him. I think there's something really satisfying in knowing that Conrad Veidt and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger have all had to deal with this challenge in different ways.

Does Dave have a favorite Joker?

I'm not sure! I'll have to ask him. He posted a picture on Facebook of a figurine of the Jack Nicholson Joker standing behind the Heath Ledger Joker.

My favorite is the Mark Hammill one, from Batman: The Animated Series. But he doesn't have to wear a prosthetic.

In the 1928 Man Who Laughs, it had to be a silent film, because Conrad Veidt couldn't speak at all with his device in. It was an internal denture that kept him from moving his lips at all. Dave at least can comfortably mouth words.

But Veidt could take his out between takes.

Dave's stuck there for ninety minutes.

If your actor can't move his mouth and can't use his voice, how do you help him build an interesting character?

Luckily, we only worked with actors who were very adept at scripting their own bodies. I'm a movement-based director, but not a choreographer, and I can't come in with a vision of how everybody should be moving in this play. We bring in specific bits of the scenario, little plot points that need to be accomplished, and give the actors an opportunity to build the movement sequences themselves. Based on what they've done, we're able to refine it and say, this moment was really clear, this moment wasn't. It becomes an editing process.

We spent a lot of time exploring how to express very simple emotions with the body. We watched a lot of movies together. We read a lot of articles. We learned what was okay and what wasn't within a silent film. You talk about how directors shouldn't give line readings? I've been giving chin readings. There's something about the silent film aesthetic that can only be accessed with a lifted chin. There's something about the way the light and shadow fall on the chin. Every actor in the play got the same note from me again and again: "Chin up, eyes wider! Chin up, eyes wider!"

A big part of any silent movie is the title cards. Did you and the playwright, Kiran Rikhye, have any kind of rule of thumb about when a card was needed and when it wasn't?

She and I never had formal discussions about when an intertitle was necessary and when it wasn't. The script I had to work with was the series of intertitles and the staging written in between. Almost every rehearsal, she'd get a sense of when the intertitles no longer felt necessary, and when we needed another one. She was very careful not to overstep the bounds of what the medium is allowed to do.

I loved when you do close-ups, with the actor downstage, looking at the audience, his face lit in golden light. Those were the moments when I most felt like I was watching a silent movie.

What I love about those moments is, those are moments when we're most directly emulating a film trick. And it should completely fail, because this actor, instead of being forty feet tall, is just sitting there, five to six feet tall, in front of that down light. But they do feel that they are that big.

Well that's great! You've created a bit of magic. Even you don't know why it works.

What I said early on was that I wanted this to be magical, I wanted to create a sense of wonder in the audience with every lights-up. And the team brought that. I've now seen it dozens of times, and the magic never fades.

For Coney Island's Mayor, A Long, Ugly Winter

Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.

Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.

Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.

“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”

Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.

Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”

When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”

“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”

For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”

At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)

The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.

Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.

Writer Guy Remembers Memorable Red Room Memories

One last thing on the impending closing of the Red Room. I'm sure it will inspire a lot of eulogizing in the next couple months, but some attention should go to Clay McLeod Chapman, who not only wrote something lovely about the tiny, doomed theater—he wrote it first!

I did a lot of stupid things in the Red Room. It’s a bit jaw-dropping to look back and reflect on all the half-assed stunts me and my cohorts pulled off in front of a live, ticket-buying audience—all in the name of downtown theater. To think that we were allowed to do what we did on that stage, that no one stopped us, that we weren’t arrested, that more audience members didn’t walk out on us… That's what made the Red Room the Red Room, with its Lynchian blood red walls and its black corrugated tin ceiling—you could always expect the unspeakable onstage. Sometimes, you even saw some great theater. Sometimes. But it was always raw. 

Now the Red Room's dead. Or dying. At the end of March, this 3rd floor stage will go the way of most black boxes here in New York City… dark for good.

“Intimate” would be one way to describe the Red Room. “Shoebox” would be another. Audience participation always went hand-in-hand with the stage, whether the script called for it or not. The main entrance to the theater was actually located right onstage, which usually meant any late-comers or drunken bar patrons looking for the bathroom would make their New York stage debut with whatever show was performing at that given moment.

There's lots more, and it's all good. If you've got any Red Room memories of your own, feel free to post them in the comments or mutter them into your scotch. Either way will work, catharsis-wise.