A View from the Bridge (and Tunnel)
As theater companies continue to move out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, many inventive troupes are making 2004 the “Year of the Abandoned Brooklyn Warehouse.” You can see this trend emerging in the riverside community of DUMBO, located Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. One company, the National Theater of the United States of America, opened a play titled What’s That On My Head!?! at a former corrugated cardboard factory known as the Nest, and an extension of that show’s run has just been announced. And a Manhattan-based troupe called WaxFactory followed up its European tour of Heiner Müller’s Quartet v.2.0 with a January run of the production at a converted stable building, minus the Brooklyn-bred horses. These companies can credit the legendary Art at St. Ann’s, where acts by the Wooster Group and David Bowie were launched, for pioneering this sort of development by relocating from a church to a defunct spice mill in 2001.
Just how influential has St. Ann’s Warehouse been to the DUMBO arts scene? Producer Andrew Lederer puts it all into perspective: “Every time they have anything, there’s a line down the block with people who didn’t even know there was a borough called Brooklyn before. They still don’t know; they think it’s some part of Manhattan across the water where they’re seeing this important theatrical event.” Lederer’s cynicism comes from years of producing in burgeoning neighborhoods, from rock and roll shows in Red Hook to spoken word poetry in Fort Greene; he even produced and performed stand-up comedy in the East Village before that area became hip.
Now, Lederer claims that Water Street in DUMBO is becoming a “Theater Row” and predicts that upcoming urban development will boost the area’s visibility. The construction of a Chelsea Market will mark an enormous commercial expansion, while the commission of Brooklyn Bridge Park will paint the town green from the river to Atlantic Avenue. “Somebody is going to do really well there,” Lederer predicts. “And those of us who are there right now are going to do very well, if we’re still there by then!”
His last co-production, Aristophanes’s anti-war satire Lysistrata, was performed in the basement of the Water Street Restaurant & Lounge. Lederer discovered the space at a political puppet show that he attended during an annual art under the bridge festival and he eventually showed the site to director Edward Einhorn. “It’s this vast space with these historic columns,” Lederer explained. “You feel like you’re in a Greek ruin.” The director reportedly gushed, “We can do Lysistrata here with 100 people!”
The project came to be known as Lysistrata 100, a majestic take on the classic concerning a sexual boycott initated by women of Athens and Sparta to end the Peloponnesian War as told by 50 men and 50 women slinking around in togas. The scale of the production matched the grandeur of a text that involves mating dances to decide the fate of empires; the sheer chutzpah of the project attracted a deluge of preview press.
A show of this size wouldn’t last a day Off-Broadway before the cost of salaries alone would cause producers to pull the plug. This production ran a full five weeks before announcing a premature closing, and its difficulties had more to do with management than finances. Nearly 10 stage managers and assistant directors were required to control the sea of actors, and the task proved daunting as some had to be replaced. Still, producers Andrew Lederer and Calvin Wynter remain optimistic about theater prospects in the area: “We think DUMBO is going to be the theater center of Brooklyn,” says Lederer, “and we want to set up roots in a spot here.”
Much of the Gallery Players‘ success happened after the company found a home in Park Slope and proved that Brooklynites could become involved in serious theater without hopping the F train. That’s not to say that some of the company’s resident artists don’t visit Manhattan on occasion; one of its founding members, an actor named Harvey Fierstein, is currently starring in a mildly successful Broadway musical called Hairspray.
Although the company has a new play development program, its niche seems to be musicals. Gallery’s recent revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown paid tribute to the show’s author, Clark Gesner, a Brooklyn resident and arts patron who died in 2002. (Unlike the recent Broadway production of the show, this one used Gesner’s original 1967 score without Andrew Lippa’s additions and emendations.) Gallery is currently offering Conor McPherson’s The Weir and up next for the company is Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. “It’s truly a neglected classic,” says the show’s director, J.V. Mercanti, a Williamsburg hipster who served as resident director for Roundabout Theater Company’s national tour of Cabaret. “The score is gorgeous and it’s an amazing story.”
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The website of the Queens-based company theater et al insists that there’s “A New Cultural Revolution in L.I.C.” (For the unsavvy, that’s short for Long Island City.) This troupe teamed up with the Laboratory for International Theater Exchange (LITE) and turned a studio of an abandoned Queens warehouse — the Repetti Chocolate Factory — into an emerging theater venue. Boasting gorgeous views of the Manhattan skyline and located near MoMA’s PS1, it’s a space that would set any real estate agent to salivating.
The founding companies host a free “Performing Arts Salon” on the second Monday of every month, and the gathering has attracted a motley group of artists. A recent salon included performances by a local opera singer and ballet dancer, not to mention a visiting vaudevillian from Philadelphia. While the main goal of the Chocolate Factory is to develop a base audience within L.I.C., the venue tries to reach out to theatergoers who live on the other side of the borough’s bridges and tunnels. One of the organizers, Adam Melnick, feels that the salon has been “very successful” at attracting diverse audiences.
Other Queens-based theaters already thrive on their local following. Queens Theatre in the Park has a mailing list of a quarter of a million people and its studio theater always seems to be filled. This is just one of the resources that prompted producer Erich Jungwirth to bring Heather Raffo’s international hit Nine Parts of Desire to Flushing for its American debut. According to Jungwirth, Queens Theater artistic director Rob Urbanati made “a very attractive offer” after seeing a workshop of the play at the Culture Project’s “Women Center Stage” festival last June. Months later, the show became the first fully-produced play of the company’s Immigrant Voices Project. For those who missed this play about an Iraqi woman who was well known for her paintings of female nudes, all may not be lost; Jungwirth says that he intends to revive the production.
The Immigrant Voices Project, which is quickly becoming Queens Theater in the Park’s most exciting initiative, will present Andy Bragen’s Greater Messapia beginning March 18. This black comedy about ethnic cleansing in Queens follows a Messapian teenager named Jan Smith who must marry before his 18th birthday or face a ritualistic beheading by ancient scimitar; the boy goes through a moral crisis as he considers taking his non-Messapian girlfriend to the senior prom. With a cast including Wooster Group vet Michael Stumm and Obie-winner Jan Leslie Harding, it promises to be one of the theater’s most interesting productions to date.
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production of The Winter’s Tale
Most of the people interviewed for this article emphasized how close their theater venues are to Manhattan. That claim is truer for some than it is for others. The Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island recently announced a multi-million dollar expansion project intended to put the arts complex on a par with Lincoln Center and BAM. That statement alone should have drawn people to Staten Island for Snug Harbor’s recent production of Fiorello! but the travel time to the venue may have intimidated many a Manhattanite.
Money has not been so free flowing elsewhere in the borough, and many community theater companies have closed up shop due to cutbacks in grants and funding. “There used to be about 10 theaters on Staten Island that produced consistently,” says Craig Stoebling, artistic director of the Staten Island Shakespearean Theatre. “Now, there are basically two.” As it happens, both SIST and Seaview Playwrights Theater — the two extant companies with full seasons of productions — are located in close proximity on the grounds of Staten Island’s Seaview Hospital and Home. And both troupes have been in continual operation since the ’70s.
In fact, SIST is one year shy of celebrating its 30th anniversary. Stoebling has seen many changes over the years and he notes that the company has survived periods of financial hardship. In fact, it was decided early on to include popular contemporary plays in the theater’s repertoire because everyone’s favorite Elizabethan playwright clearly “wasn’t going to pay the rent.”
SIST maintains a modest theater that seats about 90 people. “We’ve been fortunate in having a regular home to develop an audience,” says Stoebling. Although the company does not market itself aggressively outside of the island, it hires actors from throughout the surrounding areas; family and friends take the ferry to see their loved ones perform and they return season after season. The theater’s upcoming shows are The Night of the Iguana (beginning March 19) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (beginning June 4).
It took SIST almost three decades to develop that kind of audience. As more theater companies discover life outside of Manhattan, the road to recognition may become a little less rocky.
