![]() At the center of the drama is a young Joe Papp and his colleagues they all face cold betrayals, self-inflicted wounds and resentment from the city's moneyed elite as they steadfastedly continue to stage their free Shakespeare In The Park productions. With a four-lane highway planned for Washington Square and Carnegie Hall earmarked for demolition, there is underlying tension as entire neighborhoods on the West Side are razed to the ground to build a brand-new 'palace of art'. The year is 1958 and New York City is a virtual building site every bit of spare land is being built on - and even the older buildings are targeted for regeneration too. The author of the blisteringly popular Apple Family plays and the Tony-winning musicals James Joyce's The Dead and the Broadway version of Chess, his ode to the downtown NYC spirit mixes class drama with civic pride. The Tony Award-winning playwright and director Richard Nelson returns to the Public Theater in late 2017 with his newest world premiere drama that places the human cost of the controversial gentrification of New York City in 1958, squarely at its center. This post has been updated, originally published in 2017.A love song to art and theatre in New York! Attendees are given Venetian-style carnival masks and the set is an art exhibit in itself. Set in sprawling space converted to look like a Hitchcock inspired 1930’s era hotel, Sleep No More has been a pioneering force in immersive entertainment, and has become almost synonymous with the genre. There are two versions (hence the price difference) for a truly choose-you-own adventure theatrical stroll. Note: the show has ended for the season.Īwait an email or phone call a few days before the performance to know where to meet in Greenwich Village to enjoy a half scavenger hunt half site-specific theater performance. Be ready to survive by any means necessary. It’s a month into a post-apocalyptic world and your ticket price dictates the resources you have at hand to make it through this 75 minute experience. Photo via Speakeasy Dollhouse & The Illuminati Ball / Facebookīased on the writings of Lewis Carroll – mainly Alice in Wonderland – you and 14 others will wander around and interact with characters. _ At $200-$400 a pop, the Illuminati Ball will cost you more than one paycheck. Some current immersive shows to see in New York, costing varying portions of your paycheck: To enter a foreign world, where participation is encouraged and rewarded is a unique mode of storytelling and should not be missed. It’s certainly a special occasion activity but its decadence is worthwhile. The elaborate format of immersive theater can make it sound like Disney World, complete with an outlandish sticker price. It engages your senses in a way that lesser money suckers like movies or concerts usually cannot. Characters confide in you or feed you something that might be “poison” and you can explore the set. Instead of watching a story from the outside, you enter, inhabit and influence another world, not just abstractly but physically. The agency that this format gives a ticket holder changes the nature of that escape. The special thing about immersive theater, though, is that you are a part of the world the play is creating. People love to brand theater as an escape, and if you’re paying a small fortune to see a play, you should feel transported. Having the physical freedom to open set doors into impeccably designed taxidermy dens or coven meetings and follow actors as they sauntered or bolted from one place to another changed my perceptions of how performance works and how the relationship between audience and performer can operate. Winding my way through rows of hospital beds splattered with blood and looking in drawers for letters I had no context for, I was in my glory. I saved up my babysitting money for weeks in high school and tagged along with my especially adventurous friends. My first experience with this kind of theater was Sleep No More, a retelling of Macbeth in an old club in Chelsea by the UK production company Punchdrunk. So, when it comes to immersive theater, where the theater-goer is let loose to wander around the space and listen to the “private” conversations between characters, why pay a chunk of change for something we get for free, whether we like it or not?įor a theater geek like me, it’s a no-brainer. Theater is expensive, and who wants to pay an admission fee when we New Yorkers have front row seats to full-blown displays of the human condition in our parks, on our commutes, and through the thin walls of our apartment buildings? The city is replete with some of the most captivating stories around and they run the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking to horrifying.
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