For Adult Film & Hoi Polloi, Brooklyn Homes Become Wild Playgrounds
Adult Film's Bushwick home is growing, while Hoi Polloi gives Celine Song's "Family" a site-specific staging
Recently, while conducting interviews for a piece on the Bushwick Starr’s fancy new digs (soon to be published in The Brooklyn Rail), I found myself pondering the question of the next Starr. That is, the next DIY-run, semi-illegal outer borough den of experimentation where young theater artists can throw ideas against a wall.
“New York is in need of more baby Starrs,” as playwright Phillip Howze put it to me. “For the future of our art form, we need more gutsy young folks who are eager to band together—theater unbridled and unhinged, affordable and alive.”
One of the many potential “baby Starrs” (a list that, surely, includes innumerable groups I’ve yet to discover) is Adult Film, a company and training center based out of the basement of a residential building in Bushwick since 2022.
My first exposure to Adult Film’s cozy subterranean stagings came in March with Julia Randall’s Little Miss Ransom, a wonderfully bonkers piece that tackled with a perverse wit American obsessions with true crime, pageant culture and conspiracy theory. The company also recently presented an off-kilter adaptation of The Seagull uptown at Rutgers Presbyterian Church.
Upon a recent return to Bushwick for the company’s Fall Film + Theatre Festival, I was greeted by a surprise: Adult Film had suddenly—seemingly overnight—taken over the entire three-floor building at Cornelia Street, and the evening’s performance would be using all of it.
We began in the backyard with a lively staging of Lanford Wilson’s abstract This is the Rill Speaking, a poetic patchwork of small-town life. A joyful cast of six used every inch of the garden, performing on all sides of an audience seated on tarps. (Due warning, the flies will feast on you.)
Next, we were ushered inside for part two, an immersive staging of Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin’s Savage/Love performed across two floors of the house. Actors moved freely from room to room, hurling Shepard’s lamentations at each other, or into nothingness (the text is a collection of monologues about desire, love and longing). Film elements ran concurrently in most rooms, creating a purposefully chaotic mixed media collage—like Sleep No More-ing through a house party that refuses to end.
None of this, I should say, was remotely polished. Shepard and Chaikin’s text felt immediate in some moments, distancing in others. The immersive format was half-formed, with the team struggling to keep both floors active. Throughout the evening, performers would half drop out of character to grin or laugh at the wildness of it all, like excitable kids overwhelmed by a chance to play pretend.
Yet that playfulness was endearing, a testament to genuine camaraderie built up within a company still figuring things out.
Institutions like the Starr are not just about churning out shows. They seek to create a community for artists. Adult Film also hosts classes, scene study and acting workshops. And following the conclusion of Savage/Love, we reconvened in the basement to watch a set of short films (the line-up varies each night), then discuss them as a group. At least for now, Adult Film is valuing casual communion over slick production quality. Given the worsening state of our artistic incubators, that’s probably the right call.
Of course, the Starr was also home to timely, boundary-pushing new work. On that front, Adult Film remains an unknown. This festival felt, at times, like stumbling through an extended acting exercise—fun, invigorating, not innovative. But it was alive. Truly, honestly alive.
Over in Clinton Hill, the fucked-up siblings of Celine Song’s Family have also taken up residence in a Brooklyn home. In this case, it’s a renovated and far fancier building. This cozy and attractive space clashes deliberately with its animalistic inhabitants, who fight, scream and generally wreak havoc for all 90 minutes of Song’s disturbing if impenetrable early work.
Family is from acclaimed avant-garde group Hoi Polloi, here working alongside younger company Amanda + James. In marked contrast to Adult Film’s barely controlled chaos, director Alec Duffy’s production makes sophisticated use of its home play space. Performers Luis Feliciano, Izabel Mar and Jonah O’Hara-David (all excellent) pry open the floorboards and run through the back garden, while clever design work evokes a lights shining down from the heavens (via a skylight) and even , ar one point, a simulated rainstorm just outside the window.
Yet for all this impressive stagecraft, Family never finds a genuine feeling of danger. It all feels very controlled, wildness so carefully choreographed that it lands as false. But it’s a rare treat to see one of Song’s brutalist early works.