Bronies, Snowden & Edie Falco
An Off and Off-Off-Broadway Round Up
The Antelope Party (Dutch Kills Theater at The Wild Project)
Like so many strange off-off-Broadway works, The Antelope Party is not about what it says it’s about. Theatergoers excited to explore the unique culture of Bronies—adult cosplaying fans of My Little Pony—may leave disappointed. But if you’re open to an exploration of conspiracy theories, toxic masculinity and American vigilantism, it’s the play for you.
It is impressive, and depressing, that Dutch Kills Theater programmed Eric John Meyer’s gripping play prior to the pandemic. Meyer’s work follows a group of Bronies united by their strange shared passion, but soon divided by a local militia (dubbed “The Antelope Party”) drawing locals to their questionable cause of defending the town from “gutter punks” and other supposed threats.
Meyer brilliantly turns the question of community and acceptance on its head, drawing lines I did not anticipate between fan obsessives and QANON-adjacent groups. In one particularly dark touch, a 9/11 Truther who stumbles into the Bronies’ orbit winds up, by the play’s end, the most reasonable voice in the room. Meyer’s suggestion that Truthers now exist on a milder, comparatively harmless spectrum of conspiracy theories in America is an unsettling one to sit with.
Is Edward Snowden Single? (The Pool at New Ohio Theatre)
Sadly I could only see one offering from The Pool, an artist-led pop-up theater company which this year presented works by Kate Cortesi, Brenda Withers and Emily Zemba at the New Ohio Theatre.
Cortesi’s work Is Edward Snowden Single? is exactly what a project like The Pool should support, and also just what you fear it will produce: a messy, under-edited, self indulgent work that is also truthful, powerful and wholly inimitable. Anchored by a tour-de-force performance from Elise Kibler, Cortesi’s play is impossible to summarize, but roughly traces the fraying bond between two lifelong friends (Kibler and Rebecca S’Manga Frank, also excellent) as various complications test their respective integrity.
We hear a lot about making theater more hospitable to new audiences, but Snowden really feels like it’s doing that on an artistic level. Cortesi’s text encourages active audience response, creating a communal experience without forcing us to do work (with one unfortunate exception right at the end). And she refuses to let us take theater too seriously while we’re in her world, throwing in self-mocking asides or having characters pop in with one line only to be reminded, “you’re not in this scene.” This is both a serious look at friendship and integrity, and theater as a ridiculous lark. Why not both?
Morning Sun (Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center)
It was a (deeply silly) pleasure to return for my first Manhattan Theatre Club production at New York City Center since the shutdown. Theater isn’t really back until you’ve sat amongst the perpetually grumpy, dissatisfied MTC subscribers in subterranean Stage I, a tricky and often lifeless space.
Morning Sun did not seem to thrill this crowd—a devastating closing monologue that brought me to tears prompted one nearby patron to calmly, methodically wipe down her glasses. Though Simon Stephens’ quiet, simple play is a New York story, packed with references to old Penn Station and Murray’s Bagels, the play is actually quite challenging to take in. Stephens keeps an insistent focus on ordinariness, on tracing one family’s humble (if never mundane) crises and conflicts. Lila Neugebauer embraces the ordinariness, setting the play in a plain, beige room and demanding we simply lean in and pay attention.
Ultimately, you either feel the quiet, aching beauty of that heartbreaking ordinariness, or you don’t. So when the play reaches that final monologue, you’ll either be sobbing like me or unmoved like glasses-cleaner. The monologue sees Edie Falco’s character Charley narrating the chaotic mess of thoughts, feelings and memories shuffling through her brain in her final moments of life. Details big and small scattered throughout Stephen’s careful text come back around as we watch, and feel, a life ending.
I try not to be this normy about theater, but—Falco’s astonishing delivery of this monologue had me walking out thinking, what a privilege it is to live here, and go see an off-Broadway play, and Edie Falco is just in it, and she’s doing that. Just a privilege.