‘Zoetrope’ Brings Live Theatre Back to New York City (Review)

Exquisite Corpse Company presents a kaleidoscope of familiar, absurd scenes from life in self-isolation

The vacant lot on the intersection of Myrtle and Vanderbilt Avenues in Brooklyn wouldn’t normally catch my attention. A huge faded poster on the firewall says “Achtung, baby, here comes the Next Great Depression,” and underneath it a white wooden trailer covered with a blue tarp. Yet, I enter through the gate in the wire mesh fence holding my breath in anticipation. This inconspicuous lot with cracked asphalt, two porta-potties, and a canopy with a couple of chairs for a vestibule is the site of Zoetrope, the first in-person live theatre show that I am seeing this year! 

photo by Jess Dalene

Zoetrope, produced by Exquisite Corpse Company (producer Liz Frost) is an accessible and COVID-19 safe “portable living diorama of 2020”. The slick white trailer mentioned in the beginning is where the theatre magic happens. The name of the show refers to an optical toy of the 19th-century, pre-film era. By rotating the cylinder with drawings on its inner surface (like phases of a horse’s gallop) and looking at it from the slits on the outside, one could create the illusion of movement. ECC’s Zoetrope doesn’t rotate, but it has the slits. And once the show is brought to motion, we can observe various phases of the early days of COVID-19 era, chasing each other. Up to eight audience members can be safely seated around four openings into the trailer and observe the life of a couple in self-isolation in their tiny studio apartment. Painfully familiar and delightfully strange, Zoetrope is an attempt to distance ourselves from the challenging and tragic past year in order to start processing what happened. 

I nervously take my seat under the black muslin on the other side of the apartment’s TV screen. Other audience members get comfortable in front of the fish tank, a calendar, or a portrait. The sound of a disembodied voice and music come in through the headphones connected to an MP3 player. The curtains are pulled open and we can see Angel (Starr Kirkland, alternating with Vanessa Lynah for some of the shows) and Bae (Leana Gardella, alternatively Jules Forsberg-Lary) cozied up on the couch, each of them staring either at a laptop or a phone. A peaceful diorama of the “before” moment.      

Suddenly, notifications pop in on Angel and Bae’s devices. “Looks like it’ll be just you and me for a while,” - and so starts the long period of hibernation, dealing with panic attacks, procrastinating, taking care of each other, fighting, and making space for each other in the suffocating shoebox of a city apartment. Some of us have been down that road, some of us are still in the middle of it. And although I had a strong, repelling reaction towards COVID-themed shows in the past, Zoetrope seems to strike the right cord and at the right moment. 

Zoetrope, created by three playwrights, Elinor T Vanderburg, Leah Barker, and Emily Krause, is a realistic play with lively dialogue, poetically silent soliloquies, and generously peppered with humor. But because it is about the life of two young, hip, Brooklynites in quarantine in 2020, it is tragic and hilarious at the same time. The scenes from the life of an interracial couple rotate in front of our eyes like in a kaleidoscope: Bae brings home a fish from the supermarket because she wants a pet; a fight over an absurd amount of beans bought in a frenzy because there was nothing else in the store; Angel finds out the news of the police assaulting black citizens; the couple watches an election debate together. 

You might not witness the same exact scenes. Zoetrope has a choose-your-own-adventure structure, where audience members are responsible for the twists of the plot. Three out of four seats in the house (or would it be more accurate to say “around the house”) have panels equipped with three switches. Once a panel lights up, the viewer in front of it can make a scene selection, based on the single image on the buttons. Mine were: a VHS tape, a mascot of Goldfish crackers, and a bottle of Absolut vodka. Not wishing self-destruction on the characters I pressed a button corresponding to a VHS tape image. The scene that followed featured Bae talking to a TV, while watching what appeared to be an interior design competition show, and loading up on Goldfish. 

I am not sure if the selection misfired or if crackers were destined to appear regardless; the fact that I made a choice felt inconsequential at that moment. It was a minor disappointment because the scene was funny and endearing. Under the direction of Porcia Lewis and Tess Howsam, and intimacy direction by Daniella Caggiano, the performances of Kirkland and Gardella were beautiful and made me tear up a couple of times over the 35 minutes that the show runs.      

Perhaps the effect was strengthened by the fact that I was watching two humans performing in real life for the first time in months, only separated from them by plexiglass. Watching a live show from the other side of a TV felt uncanny and meta in some sense. Although studying every single detail in a slick, entirely black-and-white apartment (decorated by visual artists Emily Addison, Dominica Montoya) felt very familiar because of the hours spent on Zoom. 

Over the past year, all of us who frequently participate in video calls simultaneously turned into voyeurs and performers in a peep-show. Zoetrope feels similar with one exception: you can’t “turn off the self-view” or dissolve into the sea of participants with their video turned off. The show stares at you, literally (through the eyes of the actors) and figuratively (I recognized myself in a lot of it). There is nothing like live theatre when it comes to holding a mirror up to the world.             

(This review was published on NoProscenium.com on May 18)