Why January Is the Coolest Month Onstage

Why January Is the Coolest Month Onstage

Here’s an exclamation you will probably never hear: “Great news — I just got tickets to see experimental theater!”
That’s because the only thing that sounds less appealing than “experimental theater” might be “avant-garde,” which evokes a turtlenecked Frenchman approaching with a sword. Moreover, to those not versed in this fertile genre, of which New York could be the world capital, these labels — and I’m guilty of using them, for lack of better alternatives — can be both outdated and off-putting.

“It makes people think of actors rolling around in their bodily fluids,” says Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of P.S. 122, a longtime home for adventurous theater artists. Those ghosts of theater past are still around, but the experimental scene is far more accessible, diverse and dynamic than its popular image suggests. Especially this month.

January is for experimental theater what the holiday season is for prestige movies. That’s largely because the Association of Performing Arts Presenters helped raise money to create the Under the Radar festival eight years ago to do stagings at the same time as its annual conference in New York. This became a marketplace for producers from around the world to see new work they might want to program at home.

Other downtown groups followed suit with January showcases, and this year stands out as the busiest yet, with three other festivals. Along with the consistently exciting Under the Radar, which Mark Russell organizes out of the Public Theater, there is the Coil Festival, produced by P.S. 122; Other Forces, at the Incubator Arts Project at St. Marks Church; and American Realness, at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side. Mr. Russell said it was becoming something like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the summer.

The shows this month may seem remote or bizarre to some audiences. That said, like any genre with decades of tradition dominated by brilliantly influential artists (Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Spalding Gray, Richard Maxwell), experimental theater has its own conventions that have hardened and evolved.

Take these typical elements: Nonlinear narrative, multimedia, abstraction, fractured language, fourth-wall breaking, colorblind casting, stylized acting, drama-interrupting dance, site-specific settings, confessional performance art, politically incorrect provocation, irreverent updating or deconstruction of classic texts, mixing of high and low culture.

These have been the building blocks for many ingenious, entertaining shows, but they are no longer new.

It’s difficult to generalize about a genre, but what unites this disparate work, more than its content, is the process by which it is made and presented. There is great continuity: these artists infrequently leave for TV or film. (No one sees Under the Radar as a springboard to HBO.) They present more regularly than mainstream playwrights, gradually develop loyal followings and, since they are working with low budgets, they are allowed to fail and to refine their aesthetic. Spend enough time sampling these shows, and the strange quickly becomes familiar.

Coil, featuring an interdisciplinary diet of theater, dance and performance art, has its most impressive lineup ever. The playfully intellectual ensemble called the T.E.A.M. mounts “Mission Drift,” a musical about the evolution of global capitalism that pairs a current narrative with one about 14-year-old employees of the first multinational corporation. Young Jean Lee, a cult button pusher, has a nearly wordless production with a generic name, “Untitled Feminist Show,” co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center. And the visually ingenious company Temporary Distortion (“Americana Kamikaze”) juxtaposes portrayals of police officers in popular culture with firsthand accounts by real New York City police officers in “Newyorkland.”

Other Forces is more modest, featuring just two shows, one directed by a veteran (Robert Cucuzza) and the other by an emerging experimental star (Tina Satter). Mr. Cucuzza (“Speed Freaks”) delivers a modern update of “Miss Julie” with the decidedly non-Strindberg-like title “Cattywumpus.” And Ms. Satter, artistic director of Half Straddle, follows last year’s football-themed “In the Pony Palace: Football” with a sequel, “Away Uniform,” starring Pete Simpson, a familiar downtown face from, among other shows, Ms. Lee’s “Lear.”

Highlights in American Realness include a new piece about climate change by Cynthia Hopkins, who specializes in genre-defying autobiographical work, and “Broke House,” a spin on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by the flashy pop-art troupe Big Art Group.

Under the Radar shows off its usual wide range of international talent, from the technologically pioneering Builders Association (mounting “Sontag: Reborn,” a play based on that critic’s journals) to the rugged physical performance of Motus, the vigorous Italian company that is following last year’s riff on Greek tragedy (“Antigone: Contest #2”) with a docudrama about the Greek debt crisis, “Alexis: A Greek Tragedy.”

With so much happening this month, might the market for experimental theater be oversaturated? Outside these festivals, for example, is “World of Wires,” the director Jay Scheib’s adaptation of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder television film, opening at the Kitchen on Thursday.)

After suggesting that the density of shows will bring more attention for everyone, Mr. Russell of Under the Radar adds some concern. “I am frustrated that there might be so much great work that audiences can’t see it all,” he says. “I have heard complaints from international guests, producers and such, that there’s too much.” (Because of audience demand, he’s bringing back a piece by the British-German troupe Gob Squad from last year’s festival, along with a new piece from it.)

Whether the four festivals can flourish depends on the size of the audience for nontraditional theater. Yet increasingly there are breakout hits, like Elevator Repair Service’s Fitzgerald adaptation, “Gatz,” which the Public Theater is staging again in March; and “Sleep No More,” the English troupe Punchdrunk’s wordless immersive journey through a Shakespearean haunted house. Rooted in ideas from the 1960s avant-garde and mounted in a downtown warehouse, it shows no signs of closing after nine months.

The best reason to see major experimental theater today is not that it’s radical or shocking, but that it’s good. Or, at least, more frequently successful at what it aims to do than its more prominent siblings uptown. It’s also much cheaper. The average ticket price at Under the Radar is $20, and you can get 10 tickets at Coil for $100. That means the cost to go to the theater is about that of a movie (especially in the age of 3-D).

That might sound like a prosaic pitch, but consider this: Spending hundreds of dollars to go to Broadway to see an over-amped derivative musical or a play compromised by star casting when there are reasonably priced, intimate and vital alternatives that belong to an illustrious New York tradition? Now that’s a risk.

Under the Radar runs Wednesday through Jan. 15; tickets, $20 to $25, at publictheater.org or (212) 967-7555. Coil Festival runs Thursday through Jan. 29 at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village; tickets, $15, at ps122.org or (212) 352-3101. Other Forces runs Thursday through Jan. 21 at the Incubator Arts Project, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; tickets, $15 to $18, at incubatorarts.org or (212) 352-3101. American Realness runs Thursday through Jan. 15 at the Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side; tickets, $10 to $20, at henrystreet.org.