In Gowanus, You Can Have Your Play & Drink It Too

Around the corner from the Astor Place Riot compound is the famous Brooklyn Lyceum, a performance space and onetime public baths which is currently the site of Ugly Rhino's Warehouse of Horrors: Gowanus '73—a boozy bit of Halloween theater which runs through November 1. We got Ugly Rhino managing director Bryce Norbitz on the phone this morning, to ask about Halloween, bathhouse raves, and the headaches that come with organizing a theater-party in a 10,000 square foot space.

So tell me about Gowanus 73.

It's sort of a psuedo-interactive traveling theater piece. It's the entire Lyceum, the top floor, middle, bottom, it's enormous. I think it's a 10,000 square foot warehouse. Audiences follow a performer around the space and see different scenes. It's a little different each time. It kind of opens with a party atmosphere, and it always ends in a dance party.

The show is inspired by real life events at the Brooklyn Lyceum when it was Public Bath #7, as well as events in the general Gowanus area. There's a crooked cop and some mobsters and prostitutes. It's kind of a high camp investigation into a murder.

Fun!

It is fun! We've been selling out. People have a good time. It's very social. If you're not with your friends, you get to chat about what you saw and what they saw. A lot of people always wanna hang out and talk about their experiences after the show.

It sounds a little lighter than something like Sleep No More.

It's got a narrative. It's dialogue heavy. No, not dialogue heavy, but it is dialogue based. You're not directing yourself around the space. So it's a little different from Sleep No More in that fashion. It's more like seeing a play, while Sleep No More is more atmospheric. It's definitely lighter, and it has more of a Friday night out kind of vibe to it. 

People have bought tickets faster and more seriously to this show than anything we've done, because I think people are really hungry for this kind of interactive show. Even though it's not a scary show, there's suspense built up. There's a murder or two in the last scene, and everyone's watching to see what happens and when they do, we get a lot of screams and gasps.

What's tricky about organizing such a sprawling show?

You don't want the audience to see someone resetting something. You don't want to hear the same scene that you just saw. That is a little bit tricky, but there are times when it works to our advantage. That took a bit of time to figure out. 

It's a big timetable. It took like seven Excel documents to put this thing together. It's like a big map. It takes a lot of timing. If the actors get really heated in an improv, that's great, but if it's going on too long, that's where the difficulty comes in. How do we make sure that it's action-packed and keep everyone on schedule at the same time? 

Our actors are fantastic. They've done this kind of thing with us or with other people before. A lot of them are Ugly Rhino associate artists, and they're just so adaptable, and great at little things like improvising conversations with audience members. We've been able to, as the days go by, make it a more and more full experience.

Are you a big Halloween person?

No. But everyone else is! I don't think I've ever been to a haunted house in my adult live, and maybe as a kid twice, when I went into the corn maze and I cried and had to be taken out. I'm not a big Halloween person, but my two collaborators are very big on it. I know what scares me, so I know what scares other people. We wanted to put somethign together that wasn't like—Boo!—and someone pops out. Why not not spend your time having a real play, a real story? It's pretty historically accurate, or at least in a referential kind of way.

How did your research process work?

The current building owner we're very close with, and he's in touch with everyone that's alive who owned the building before him.  A lot of stories came down the line that way.  There's a window in the Lyceum, so that if you're in the street you can hop the fence and climb down to where the baths are. In the early '70s, kids would climb down there and have these huge parties. They called them raves, so we called them that too. This was before disco was a thing, so it was a pretty rowdy scene. 

We also heard these stories about these local murders, and though, what a perfect and true setting. A rave party in the early '70s where people may or may not be getting murdered? That's a perfect show, especially for Ugly Rhino, because everything we do has a party attached to it.

I'm trying to talk my girlfriend into coming next week. What should I tell her?

It's a great show for someone who doesn't want your typical haunted house experience, someone who wants to have their play and drink it too. Hey! I just thought of that! That's pretty good, right?

Arena Stage Likes to Share

Responding to Howard Sherman and David Dower's conversation last week about the lack of reporting on Arena Stage's involvement with Virginia Woolf, I wrote this for Bullett. 

The current revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf opened on October 13th, the fiftieth anniversary of the show's Broadway debut, and has been greeted with the kind of praise usually reserved for Derek Jeter. Although credited as the brainchild of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where the production first appeared in 2010, the show was in fact a collaboration between the Chicago outfit and Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage. 

Woolf played Arena in the spring, as part of an Edward Albee festival that marked the decades-old theater's first season in their new home, the stately Mead Center for American Theater. Certain thoughtful members of the New York theater scene have complained that, as far as credit for the production goes, Arena has gotten stiffed. To right that wrong, we at Bullett put in a call to Edgar Dobie, executive director at Arena Stage.

Tell me about this production's trip from Chicago, to D.C., to New York. How did it wind up at Arena Stage?

We produced Virginia Woolf as part of the Edward Albee festival, so for us it had a huge arc, and was a really important moment for the theater. Edward is one of those authors who's involved, and who has absolute right of approval around things like selection of director and casting. Some authors don't work that way. They write it and allow it to be interpreted whatever way you want. Albee was involved in approving Pam MacKinnon as a director, and he was here for rehearsals and saw the show several times.

Pam's dream cast was [Steppenwolf ensemble members] Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, so that led to reaching out to Martha Lavey and David Hawkanson, at Steppenwolf. We discovered they had wanted to do Albee's work, and that they just hadn't done it because they couldn't reconcile Edward Albee's way of needing to approve everything with their ensemble format. What we offered was a director, Pam MacKinnon, who they wanted to work with. The vision of the author and the director began to fit like a glove.

The play was very much carefully and lovingly produced at Steppenwolf, but the spark and the opportunity for it, from our perspective, originated here. We're happy to share it.

There's more. Much more! Check it out, fella. If you didn't see my rather rambly review of the production, now you can, using the Internet.

And if anybody else needs some reporting done, just tweet about it. I'm like a superhero who doesn't have any powers but knows how to make phone calls.​

At Atlantic, The Set Unfolds Like An Onion

At the critically-beloved Harper Regan, running at the Atlantic Theater Company through November 4th, the audience is greeted by a rather grim set. Three rows of steel walls fill the stage, each taller than the one before, closing down the space so claustrophibically that any audience member hoping for spectacle becomes nervous. It looks like a steel birthday cake, or something from the Global Guts vault. The first scene is tense, still, and crowded entirely in front of the first wall. As it ends, one wonders, "Where the hell do they go from here?"

And then Harper starts knocking down barriers. The front wall goes first, with a thud that makes the audience start. Soon, Mary McCann and her fellow actors are finding barstools hidden in the panels, producing sofas from nowhere, and finally inverting the entire back of the set to reveal a cramped English garden. In a play whose tone is icy, whose dialogue is off-putting, and whose characters hardly interact, Hauck's set is an unfolding wonder—a bit of magic in a show about men and women whose lives hold very little magic at all.

"It was quite a long design process," said Hauck in an interview this week. To bring Simon Stephens' ultra-lean play to life, she and director Gaye Taylor Upchurch had to deal with eleven scenes, nine locations, and stage directions that give no clue how the set is to look. Hauck and Upchurch started with a naturalistic, crowded set, but soon scaled it back until it was "very pared down and a little bit merciless," and "gave Harper nowhere to hide." Keeping Harper exposed helps McCann stay vulnerable, and gives her reason for her character's occasional lashing out.

"I think she loves knocking that stuff over," said Hauck. "It's incredibly exciting to me, when she shoves over walls and they become floors. I don't think anybody's expecting it."

As Hauck sees her, Harper Regan is "a person in free fall, a person searching for what to do next, a person completely alone and completely at a loss," who reacts to news of her father's sudden illness by fleeing her family to spend a few days in her hometown of Stockport. Though she goes to see her father, she arrives just after he dies. Visiting hours are over, and she doesn't even get to see his body. When she returns home, something has changed within her, but it's not clear what—a vagueness reflected in the garden that appears for the final scene, which Hauck called, "the moment of rleease and relief and payoff." 

"Those big doors open," she said, "and you finally get a breath of just the tiniest bit of growth."

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​And just when you least expect it—a garden!

Though most of his stage directions were vague, Stephens labored over the description of what is on the breakfast table for Harper's last conversation with her husband—orange juice, fruit, a French press full of coffee. 

"To me, that scene needs to present hope," Hauck said. "The text of that scene is quite complicated, and it's nowhere near as clear as it appears to be. That juxtaposition came from Simon. What he really was hoping to see in that final scene was something organic. So against all of that steel, you have just the tiniest bit of green. It's a backyard, but it's not a hopeful backyard." 

Harper Regan is not a hopeful play, but it is occasionally beautiful. And nothing in it is quite so impressive as the ugly steel set that slowly unfolds to reveal a bit of green.