Last year, the Public Theater was forced to cancel its annual multi-week Under the Radar Festival of international, experimental, multidisciplinary theater due the spread of the Omicron variant, which caused cancellations, flight disruptions, and visa processing delays. (A digital edition of the festival was presented in 2021.)
Last week, the downtown festival finally returned for the first time in person since 2020, with 36 artists from nine countries performing at six venues over 19 days. We spoke to longtime festival director Mark Russell about some of this year’s shows, some of which had originally been planned for last year.
Otto Frank – “Roger Guenveur Smith is an amazing solo performer who shows up in a lot of Spike Lee films and is most known for his interpretations of Huey Newton and Rodney King. Here, he is channeling Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. It is a grieving and a compelling story. Roger also takes Otto into the present, into Black Lives Matter, into what’s happening all over the world. It’s very interesting to see an African-American man channeling this amazing Jewish activist. And the resonances of the Holocaust are so present now.”
Your Sexts Are Sh*t: Older Better Letters – “Rachel Mars is a great performance artist from the UK. This is a lighter piece from her where she takes bawdy letters from people like Byron and Joyce to their lovers and contrasts them with today’s sexting and texting relationships. It’s really about how the flirtatious language and the sexual language we use has changed over the years.”
seven methods of killing kylie jenner – “There are no Kyle Jenners hurt during this performance. It’s actually about Black women’s identity and the internet, which is almost a full character in this piece, and the way that memes and body types are put upon the identities of so many of our young people. It’s a major piece from the Royal Court Theatre. We have been trying for years to get it here.”
The Indigo Room – “This is happening at LaMaMa. It begins as an immersive piece, in almost a carnival atmosphere, with games and barkers. Then you go through several passages and you end up in a large circle around Timothy White Eagle, who tells these beautiful simple stories that parallel Native American stories. Everyone is given a bit of salt, which is eventually put into this vessel at the center.”
Moby Dick – “‘Moby Dick’ is a very hard book to put onto film into the theater. This is the most vibrant version I’ve seen. It’s huge scale puppetry. There is a 60-feet whale onstage. And it is of course a very dark story and a story of obsession. The music is a very dark, almost goth, rock score.”
A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly – “It’s a delicate end to a trilogy about springing from the pandemic. It’s quite radical in that there are no performers in it. There are 16 audience members who very subtly become the performers by reading off of cards. It does take you on a whole journey. At the same time, you become very close with these strangers.”
Multiple venues, publictheater.org. Through Jan. 22.
