The annual Under the Radar festival continues at various venues through Jan. 15. Here critics respond to three very different festival shows running at the Public Theater; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org.
After
Through Sunday
Hallucinatory. Psychotropic. Miraculous. A show like Andrew Schneider’s “After” invites baroque descriptors. But I should probably just tell you that for most of the show I thought the stage was floating. The stage was not floating.
With “Youarenowhere,” which played at the Coil festival in 2015, Mr. Schneider established himself as a sorcerer of technical theater, able to control light and darkness, sound and silence, with astonishing precision. At one point he renovated the theater midshow. “After” doubles down on that wizardry. Expect your eyes and ears to play tricks on you. Your nose may also get in on the game.
Before the show begins, ushers stride up and down the aisles, asking people to silence their phones and warning them that the show will include 30 minutes of total darkness and that if they need to leave at any point they should raise a hand for assistance.
The house lights dim, an engine roars, and stars flame and flicker out. Gradually a prone body emerges and then another that walks and uptalks. These are Mr. Schneider himself and Alicia aya Ohs, a performer who also helped with direction and script development. They share a number of split-second scenes in which they might be lovers or work mates or lab rats.
Continue reading the main storyI want to tell you about all of them, but I don’t want to deprive you of any of them. I want you to be the man behind me, who had clearly had a few drinks and spent most of the show sputtering, “Wait! What?”
But here a few rudimentary facts: Mr. Schneider wears a shirt this time. Where “Youarenowhere” used Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” “After” relies on Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” a significant comedown. And in place of the sustained surprise of “Youarenowhere,” “After” is mostly a sequence of quick takes, frenetic and exact.
A chair is there and then it isn’t. Bodies materialize and vanish. Voices are thrown around the room and in and out of throats. (The ace sound design is by Bobby McElver and Mr. Schneider.) In a cute moment, an old push-button phone — never mind. You’ll see.
“After” works on you in strange ways, both in and out of the darkness. (That extended period of gloom? It’s weird and meditative and a little boring.) I spent a lot of the show squinting, unsure if I could trust my senses. I think I saw a color I’d never seen … Wait? What! And at one point I’m sure I smelled a fire and spent the next few minutes debating whether I should put my hand up.
What is all this razzle-dazzle for? Unclear. The writing was the weakest point of Mr. Schneider’s earlier show, and even with an assist from Ms. Ohs, it’s not much better here. Part collage art and part word salad, some lines sound lifted from a relationship spat, others repurposed from a self-actualization seminar.
Maybe “After” is about the last sensory burst just before brain death. Maybe it’s about the strangeness of a universe we experience only through our neurons. Maybe it’s about sandwiches. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure Mr. Schneider does either.
One of these days, he is going to find some content worthy of his form. Nothing’s gonna stop him then.
ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Antigonón, un Contingente Épico
Through Sunday
Two men and two women stand naked onstage, performing a kind of slow-motion ballet. Do they represent the four children of Oedipus? Are the women, as in Sophocles’ “Antigone,” burying their brothers, dead on opposite sides of a civil war? In any case, this wordless opening scene is the last time you are likely to think of the ancient tale while trying to understand “Antigonón, un Contingente Épico” — even though it bears a title that suggests an intimate connection.
That Rogelio Orizondo’s play touches on death, tyranny and disobedience to the state is not in question. A production of Cuba’s Teatro el Público, it includes newsreel footage that seems to show the suffering of soldiers and civilians during the Cuban revolution. Still, when I read afterward that “old and new figures from Cuba’s tumultuous history populate this brave work in which icons are reborn and others are abandoned,” I was nonplused.
What I had seen was nowhere near as specific as that. After the opening, the two women took turns delivering surrealist monologues filled with ripe imagery but no context, while the men continued to writhe on the floor. Soon, another woman, styled like a stewardess except for the lack of a skirt, slacks or underwear, delivered her own ferocious speech.
The disjuncture between the angry, often horrible words being spoken (in Spanish, with English supertitles) and the bits of hilarious costume the characters soon started to don and change compulsively made the historical material seem almost like a pretext for fabulousness. No surprise that Teatro el Público bills itself as a “provocateur in the underground counterculture of fashion, spectacle, cabaret, theater and drag.”
Eventually some in the audience began to catch on and allowed themselves — a bit hesitantly — to laugh. That the rest of us did not may be the result of a protective instinct, for the material and for ourselves. Surrealism has a funny way of slapping you down whenever you think you’re onto it. When one of the women appeared in an outfit that looked like a macramé lampshade, the stage seemed to light up. But when I checked the supertitles a moment later, she was talking about lying on her deathbed while being dismembered for recycling.
A similar confusion recurs so often that it must be the house style. And eventually I did manage to grab the hem of an idea such confusion may have been meant to suggest: that the vulgarity of war, even a justified war, can only be expressed in the most extreme, contradictory and mystifying ways.
The production, directed by Carlos Díaz, certainly does that.
JESSE GREEN
The Gates: An Evening of Stories With Adam Gopnik
Through Sunday
As a young man leaving Montreal in 1980 to build a grown-up life in Manhattan, the essayist Adam Gopnik got some savvy advice from his father: “Never underestimate the other person’s insecurity.”
If the younger Mr. Gopnik followed that counsel — and we can guess that he did, because he mentions it more than once in “The Gates: An Evening of Stories With Adam Gopnik” — it could only have helped in his swift professional ascent. By 1986, he was writing for The New Yorker, which he has been doing ever since.
The ease and certainty of tone that are so palpable in his essays, though, are missing from his autobiographical solo show. Directed by Catherine Burns, the artistic director of the storytelling program the Moth, “The Gates” is said to be unscripted, yet it’s so premeditated that it’s starved for spontaneity.
These are, in fact, stories that Mr. Gopnik has told before, and if you’ve read his latest collection, “At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York,” the first half of the show will sound familiar. In the second half, he also borrows from his earlier book “Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York.” What emerges onstage is a fond memoir of a happy family.
In “The Gates,” Mr. Gopnik tells how he and his wife, Martha Parker, twice made a home in New York — the second time when, after years abroad, they returned with their two children. He unspools his recollections with humor, self-deprecation and evident affection, but there is an awkwardness to his performance, a sense that he is still feeling his way through an unfamiliar medium.
During a brief interlude between the show’s halves, after Mr. Gopnik exits the stage, the audience sees projected photos of him and Ms. Parker in the 1980s, young and gorgeous, adventurers in a grittier New York. If only the vitality and fascination of those images would make their way into the storytelling.
LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
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