Review: Under the Radar 2024: Open Mic Night

If you’ve been in New York long enough, you may have ventured into a venue — one geared toward avant-garde poets, performance artists, and edgy comics — that didn’t quite come up to code, legally or otherwise (i.e., that beer you were drinking was sold to you without a liquor license). Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey ran one such place in Brooklyn called Life World, and they bring the idea of this now defunct establishment back to life in Mabou Mines and the Performance Space’s presentation of their show Open Mic Night.

The pair have been working together for some time and contributed to last year’s Under the Radar festival with Protec/Attac. At the top of this quirky production, Mounsey deadpans a hilarious backstory about how she first met the “recessive” Weiss, while right behind her, Weiss installs a spotlight. Almost immediately it’s tough to tell where improv and script converge as Mounsey recesses herself behind a laptop screen and Weiss takes the narrow stage.

For most of the 50-minute show, Weiss engages in that distinctly challenging form of standup known as “crowd work.” Facing opposite Mounsey (the audience sits on either side of the stage), the tousle-haired Weiss begins to gather “data” about the audience with a series of increasingly absurd questions — “This voice or this voice?” he asked me (I chose the bass-inflected latter) — before venturing up into the risers for more personal interaction.

If you’re averse to audience participation, this is not the show for you. Weiss will find you. But Mounsey is there behind her laptop letting him know when he goes too far. A gentle ping sounds when she approves of something he had said, a warning buzzer when she does not.

The show captures the exciting weirdness of the kind of performance we don’t often see in New York anymore. One part standup, the other part performance art, Open Mic Night never feels out of Mounsey and Weiss’s control, or maybe only slightly, as when an audience member told Weiss that they would like him to stand somewhere farther away. But despite the improvisational nature of the piece, we get the feeling that they are both very much in character, however much those characters are based on themselves.

Expectedly or not, you can get a beer toward the end, though having one at the beginning might have set the scene better, along with tables and chairs rather than risers for seating. But if this kind of daring, freewheeling experience is your can of PBR, Open Mic Night might be as close as you’re going to get these days to an underground brand of artistry that feels more and more like part of a bygone era.