Two-Part Names & Other Joys: An Interview with Faith Zamblé
The Civilians' Resident Dramaturg Phoebe Corde sits down (virtually) with Extended Play editor Faith Zamblé to talk dramaturgy, research, and more.
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A couple of immersive solo shows and an interactive city-wide celebration fill out our weekly roundup. Geoff Sobelle brings boxes of stuff to New York Theater Workshop, while Siobhan O’Loughlin bathes in a secret location, and Rimini Protokoll plugs audiences into an audio experience in Los Angeles.
A reminder that the weekly roundup isn’t an endorsement, as we’ve not personally seen everything. It’s our way of keeping you in the loop.
Celebrate Center Theatre Group’s 50th Anniversary Season with a pedestrian-based live art experience. You’ll join a group of 50 people swarming out into Los Angeles on a guided audio tour that seems to follow you as much you are following it, directed and produced by award-winning international documentary theater team Rimini Protokoll. Meet up, put on headphones, and have your perspective changed. You are provided with a soundtrack to the streets, sights, and rooftops of Los Angeles. A computer-generated voice sets you out on a trail through the city, guiding your group’s movements in real time. The performance reveals a “secret Los Angeles,” continuing to places normally unseen, places where humans encounter their limits, places where crowds gather, back alleyways, dark hallways, and common areas seen through a new lens. At times the group is given tasks—take the Metro, travel at a new pace. You’re not just audience members—you’re actors and spectators, observers and observed, individuals and hordes, all at the same time.
Actor-illusionist-inventor and NYTW Usual Suspect Geoff Sobelle’s “virtuosic” New York Times Critics Pick “The Object Lesson” comes to NYTW for a strictly limited engagement. This tactile installation turns the theater into a storage facility of gargantuan proportion where audiences are free to roam and sift through the clutter. Sobelle transforms this makeshift attic into a space of reflection and wonder as he unpacks our relationship to everyday objects: breaking, buying, finding, fixing, giving, losing, winning, trading, selling, stealing, storing, collecting, cluttering, clearing, packing up, passing on, buried under… a world of things. “The Object Lesson” is a meditation on the stuff we cling to and the crap we leave behind.
“Broken Bone Bathtub” is an immersive theater project taking place inside a bathtub, in an actual home. After a serious bike accident, a young woman musters up the courage to ask for help and shares her story, exploring themes of trauma, suffering, human generosity and connection. The audience takes on the role of Siobhan’s close friends; not only listening but sharing in their experiences, and assisting the cast-clad artist in the actual ritual of taking a bath.