Review: "Romeo and Juliet"

Shakespeare in the Parking Lot’s Romeo and Juliet takes advantage of an urban environment and features great performers.

It can be difficult to get tickets to the Public's Shakespeare in the Park—tickets are free, but they can go fast and require long waits. But luckily the great city of New York has a few alternatives to enjoy the Bard’s classics under the stars. One of the most established and beloved, the Drilling Company's Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, celebrates its 25th season with a production of Romeo and Juliet set on the Lower East Side in the early 1990s. Don’t let the “scrappy” aesthetic veer you away from this gem. Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, with its unpredictable weather, plastic chairs, and honking of passing cars, is an essential New York experience, featuring an array of great talent.  

Adam Huff and Serena Ebony Miller in Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

This tragedy of star-crossed lovers is often staged in the present day, or not-so-distant past, something that works perfectly here, given the urban surroundings and the sounds of a buzzing city (half the time I couldn’t tell if a piece of music or a dog’s bark was a deliberate effect or a coincidence). The Capulets are imagined as an established family on the verge of decline, and the Montagues are mobsters hungry for control of the streets. Costumes by Sofia Piccolo evoke nostalgia for the recent past and help create believable characters. Swords are replaced with knives, making for some heart-pounding combat scenes (choreographed by Frank Alfano) that unfold inches from the first row.

The cast, under the direction of Lukas Raphael, gives a high-energy, vibrant performance. There is a lot of humor and physicality, which help them deliver every witty, elaborately constructed line of Shakespeare's text. In the Drilling Company’s hands, Romeo and Juliet is widely accessible to people of various ages and walks of life without being ingratiating or condescending. This equilibrium—staying faithful to Shakespearean language while making sure that a modern, diverse audience understands his words—is not easily achieved. But while the occasional modern-day allusion finds its way in, perhaps catching some off-guard, the Drilling Company is largely successful in striking that balance.

I initially had trouble adjusting to different actors projecting at different volumes (especially when the music from the boombox overpowers them). But once the music is out of the way, it becomes easier to appreciate the range of tones, from boisterous Mercutio (Alessandro Colla), a loud young man who gets himself into trouble, to Capulet (Jack Sochet), mumbling in the beginning and spinning into violent rage once he hears that his daughter loves an enemy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Juliet’s parents (Kendra Lee Oberhauser is Lady Capulet) portrayed as three-dimensionally as they are in this production.       

Anwen Darcy's Juliet is undoubtedly the star of the show; for her alone, this production is worth the trip (and the battling of heat or rain). Excitable and moody (as befits a teenager), Darcy radiates such exuberance of youth that you can almost see the electrical charge coming out of her black-nailed fingertips. As Romeo, Adam Huff matches her energy. If the awkward staging of their final scene is a bit cramped, this doesn’t spoil the overall impression.

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Romeo and Juliet plays at the La Plaza at the Clemente Parking Lot, 114 Norfolk Street, through July 27, 2019. The running time is 100 minutes with no intermission. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7. Admission is free, donations are welcome. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Or bring your own chairs and/or blankets. No one is ever turned away. For more information visit shakespeareintheparkinglot.com.

Romeo and Juliet is by William Shakespeare. Produced by Shakespeare in the Parking Lot and The Drilling Company. Directed by Lukas Raphael. Fight Choreography by Frank Alfano. Set Design by Lukas Raphael. Costume Design by Sofia Piccolo. 

The Cast is Adam Huff, Anwen Darcy, Alessandro Colla, Una Clancy, Jake Lesh, Kendra Lee Oberhauser, Jack Sochet, Serena Miller, John Caliendo, and Samantha Sutliffe.

‘Reinventing the Prayer Wheel’ at the Rubin Museum Empowers Visitors (Review)

Examining an exhibition of interactive art, inspired by ancient Tibetan ritual 

Self-help experts say that an intention which is written down has more power than just a thought. You are forced to formulate it more carefully and reflect on it more thoroughly, which ultimately helps to figure out what you want and how to start moving towards it. This practice originates in religious traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, where the mantras are written on scrolls and wrapped around the core of prayer wheels. An exhibition currently at the Rubin Museum called The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel Rubin Museum, studies the phenomenon in depth and offers the visitors to solidify their own goals for the remainder of the year.         

Metamorphy. Photo courtesy of the artists.

   

Greeting the guests at the bottom of the spiral staircase in the lobby is an interactive installation, Wheel of Intentions (2019), created by Potion and Ben Rubin, and based on a concept by the Rubin Museum. It looks like an Apple-inspired version of an ancient prayer wheel: a solid, glossy cylinder reaching hip-height. A white top with a keyboard mounted on it glows with a prompt to type my intention using36 characters or fewer. After taking a minute to collect my thoughts, I type: “Learn to meditate.” After I’m done, with a spin of the wheel and a “whoosh” sound, my goal is flying up the spiral staircase, a sight equally exciting and inspiring.

I follow my visualized intention up to the 5th floor and find myself enveloped in two panoramic projection screens with other people’s intentions floating in the darkness. Some have pledged to “strive for success,” “stay in the present moment,” or “find a new path.” Some have chosen to focus on more earthly needs like “have a hot threesome” or “eat pizza.” The ever-moving swirl of anonymous intentions is reactivated every time anybody spins the wheel on the ground floor. This principle of activating your own resolution, as well as everyone else’s intentions on the digital “scroll,” is borrowed from the prayer wheel, a secret object conceptually deconstructed in the exhibition. Buddhists believe that with each turn of the wheel the mantras that it contains within are “read” and sent out into the world, making them more powerful.    

  

After my experience with Wheel of Intentions, I explore the rest of the exhibit. My visitor’s journey through The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel takes me through five sections, each looking into a different aspect of the prayer wheel as a ritualistic object: intention and commitment, repetition, engagement, accumulation, and belief. Traditional prayer wheels of various designs are paired with the works of contemporary artists, enriching the perception of objects from both worlds. Some of the modern works run more contemplative but are engaging nonetheless. 

I dive into studying details of the intricate works of Youdhi Maharjan and get hypnotized by the ever-emerging Landscape of Belief (2012) by Monika Bravo. But perhaps the main showstoppers of the exhibition are two interactive installations: Breathless  (2012) by Alexandra Dementieva and Metamorphy (2014) by Gregory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt.

As much as it is pleasing visually, Breathless is confusing. It consists of two barrel-shaped sculptures made of “ribs” that light up whenever the key terms related to power and intention are used on the internet in real time. The source is unspecified in the description, which makes me doubt if the futuristic “tubes” are really connected to the World Wide Web and where the words like “ability,” “will,” “power,” “attempt,” and “release” come from before they appear on the display on top of the sculptures. As a word appears more frequently, more lights become active. The visitor can enter the sculpture and blow onto an anemometer which influences the illumination pattern and (as stated in the description) the art’s RSS feed. 

While the cumulative effect of people on the internet using a particular word is quite visible (more lights on the sculpture turn on), it is a little obscure how exactly the effort of a single individual ( embodied here in the breath) affects the power of the collective. “Blow it away!” yells one woman to her friend. “You are making it go away!” But why would somebody wish to blow away the word “ability”? We don’t necessarily know in which context the word is being used. Even after reading the description of Breathless thoroughly, I am still unsure about the effects my actions will have.

Metamorphy, on the other hand, was both visually stunning as well as a more fulfilling experience. The piece consists of a semi-transparent circular membrane which one can approach and activate by pushing the fabric of the membrane; I enjoyed both interacting with the art myself as well as watching other people doing it. Each touch by a visitor causes a colorful abstract projection pattern—reminiscent of mandala, a colorful geometric pattern representing the universe—to appear on its surface. The projection was paired with a deep electronic sound with each interaction. And thanks to a large mirror on the other side of the disc, the viewer could also see their reflection in the middle of the splash of color.  By taking an abstract and poetic approach (as opposed to literal and explicit), Metamorphy reflects on physical contact as a means to activate something. In the case of the prayer wheel, the spinning of the wheel ensures that the mantras are read somewhere “above.” But in the case of Metamorphy, the work of art only exists in the moment of interaction. In fact, interacting with the piece becomes a performance itself, the silent object turns into a living light-painting canvas and a musical instrument at the same time.

Before encountering the exhibit, I believed the topic of Tibetan prayer wheels to be highly specific and really a niche interest. What I found surprising at Reinventing the Prayer Wheel were the instructions embedded into the exhibits about how to work with your intentions to generate power: both within myself and my community. By setting up an “intention” upon entry, and then going through the exhibition and playing (mentally, or physically, or both) with the different mechanics” of prayer wheels, I inevitably picked up on methods of how to bring my own dreams to life: to set an intention, to commit, to engage repeatedly in a physical action, to accumulate others, and to believe. As for working on my personal intention, I downloaded an app for meditation immediately after I came home from the museum and am happy to report my inconsistent but steady progress.

(This review was published on NoProscenium.com on June 28th)