Category: Theater

On a dark, featureless stage in Amsterdam, a soon-to-be-crucified Jesus Christ laments his predicament while sporting a shimmery tank-top and gray New Balance sneakers. His followers, gathered around him, look like they have raided an Urban Outfitters store sometime around 2012.

By stark contrast, his persecutors, led by King Herod and Pontius Pilate, wear severe white, floor-length robes and black coats. In an earsplitting falsetto, Jesus reproaches his father, God, for having put him in this position. As well he might.

This revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s kitschy 1971 musical about the last few days of Jesus’s life, is directed by the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. It’s an odd match.

Van Hove has built his reputation on aesthetically striking, often psychologically intense re-imaginings of well-known works — including canonical plays (“Hedda Gabler” and a riveting “A View from the Bridge”); golden-age Hollywood movies (“All About Eve”); and contemporary fiction (“Who Killed My Father” and “A Little Life”). And though his range is wide, there has always been intellectual ambition in his choice of subject matter: a serious interest in the poetics of human tragedy.

So it’s hard to fathom what drew him to “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a musical whose notoriety has been largely premised on the incongruity between its somber subject matter and its disarmingly peppy, down-with-the-kids lingo. At times, the lyrics also have rather forced, knowingly silly rhymes, such as when Jesus implores God to “show me now that I would not be killed in vain? Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain.” To transmute such willful inelegance into high art would be a miracle indeed.

The productions runs at the DeLaMar Theater through Feb. 18, with a cast that is almost entirely Dutch, delivering songs in smooth English. Magtel de Laat gives an impressive vocal performance as the prostitute Mary Magdalen, whose touchy-feely tenderness toward J.C. offended the sensibilities of Christian conservatives when the musical first appeared in the 1970s.

With his long locks, wide-neck T-shirt and gray jeans, Lucas Hamming’s Judas Iscariot, who narrates the story, has something of the beleaguered British comedian Russell Brand about him. It’s a strong look for the part.

In the title role, the Surinamese singer Jeangu Macrooy has an ethereal, deer-in-the-headlights vulnerability that is a little hard to square with the messiah’s much-vaunted charisma: His Jesus comes across more like the fey frontman of a mid-ranking indie band than a rabble-rousing revolutionary. When both Mary and Judas muse aloud on the secret of his magnetism in “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (“I don’t see why he moves me / He’s a man, he’s just a man!”), it feels all too real.

In fairness, however, the weakness here is the material, not the performers. Aside from one pivotal moment — the betrayal of Jesus by Judas — there are few twists and turns. It’s mostly exposition and wallowing. The show’s straightforward plot trajectory is neatly summed up in a dismal couplet in the lament “Gethsemane,” in which Jesus finally resigns himself to his fate: “Then, I was inspired / Now I’m sad and tired.”

The music (arranged by Ad van Dijk) is a competent reworking of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s original songs — a blend of classic rock riffs and poignant power ballads — but there isn’t much variety. The timbre is either very up or very down, with only the occasional curveball. A chipper, upbeat number plays during a scene in which Jesus is violently tormented by his captors, and even briefly waterboarded. It’s darkly edgy, reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s heyday.

The sung-through format, together with van Hove’s fidelity to Rice’s lyric sheet, have a fatally constraining effect. Short of rewriting the thing, the director must rely almost entirely on audiovisual effects — the austere set and occasionally spectacular lighting effects are by Jan Versweyveld — in order to turn it into something other than bubble gum theater. Unsurprisingly, van Hove only half succeeds.

During one scene, in which a guilt-ridden Judas suffers paroxysms of remorse, the lights blink on and off at jarringly sporadic intervals to heighten our sense of his psychological turmoil. But other embellishments merely nod to an idea of avant-garde experimentalism without actually enhancing the experience: When the cast hands out wine bottles and glasses to audience members during the Last Supper, it’s not immersive, it’s just awkward.

The production’s strengths and weaknesses are succinctly represented in its closing scene. “Jesus Christ Superstar” ends with a bloody Jesus, arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose, propped up by his entourage and elevated under a shaft of deep orange light that very gradually brightens — evocative of sunsets and sunrises, endings and beginnings — before he is drenched in a fine, mist-like rain dispensed from a sprinkler system. It’s a stunning image, beautifully rendered.

Moments earlier, however, members of the supporting cast were smearing blood over each other’s torsos in a heavy-handed metaphor for their moral complicity in Jesus’s demise. It felt overwrought and trite, like a sophomore art-school project. Van Hove has a thing for bloody imagery: His Hedda Gabler was famously doused with tomato juice by the lascivious Judge Brack; “A View from the Bridge” ends with its cast being symbolically drenched in blood. It worked well then, but the trick has worn thin.

People flocked to see “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the ’70s and ’80s, and, writing in The Times in 1993, Frank Rich suggested that such rock operas were musical theater’s clumsy attempt to win back the audience base it had lost to rock ‘n’ roll.

Today, guitar music itself is arguably as much a fixture of the nostalgia circuit as vaudeville, and so to revive a rock opera in 2023 is to heap kitsch upon kitsch. The only way to make it work — if you must insist on doing it — would seem to by ramping up the humor and exuberance. Van Hove, for all his qualities, is not renowned for either.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Through Feb. 18 at the DeLaMar Theater, in Amsterdam; delamar.nl

By the mid-1980s, Tanya Berezin had gone far as a New York stage actress. She had collected glowing reviews for her Off Broadway performances over the years, and she had won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson’s play “The Mound Builders” in 1975.

Even so, she was growing weary of the hustle. “When you’re in your 40s it seems really sort of inappropriate to be waiting for telephone calls from people to ask you to do a job,” she said in a 1993 interview. “It just feels really uncomfortable and childish.”

Her budding career crisis turned out to be an opportunity. In 1986, Ms. Berezin turned her attention from the stage to a highly influential behind-the-scenes role in the theater world: artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company, a storied Off Broadway incubator of talent that she had helped found in 1969.

Ms. Berezin died on Nov. 29 at the home of her daughter, Lila Thirkield, in San Francisco. She was 82. Ms. Thirkield said the cause of her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was lung cancer.

Circle Rep at the time was often associated with the lyric naturalism of playwrights like Mr. Wilson and John Bishop, which centered on the daily struggles of the marginalized and underrepresented. Ms. Berezin declared from the outset that she planned to expand the company’s focus to include more experimental and topical fare.

“Her goal was to bring in more imaginative work — Craig Lucas, Jon Robin Baitz, ” Marshall W. Mason, the company’s founding artistic director, said in a phone interview. “She didn’t go toward the classics at all. Under my tenure we did Chekhov, Shakespeare and Schiller.”

That new direction was not always met with a warm welcome at first. “Certainly everyone was confused last season,” Ms. Berezin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1988. “Our subscribers were confused; the press was confused.”

She was undeterred. “What I’m hoping will happen is that Circle Rep continues to confuse people,” she added. “It will never have one specific personality again. In a sense, we are a brand-new theater that happens to be important.”

Despite the initial skepticism, Circle Rep came to flourish artistically during Ms. Berezin’s eight-year tenure, a period in which the company broke new ground with plays like “The Destiny of Me,” Larry Kramer’s intimate portrayal of a man dealing with AIDS; “Three Hotels,” Mr. Baitz’s razor-sharp look at the capitalist mind-set; and Paula Vogel’s “Baltimore Waltz,” about a schoolteacher’s relationship with her terminally ill brother.

“It was the most astonishing era,” Mr. Lucas, whose critically acclaimed plays “Reckless” and “Prelude to a Kiss” received their premieres at Circle Rep in those years, said in a phone interview. “She invited an entire cohort of writers who were completely unfamiliar to the New York theater audience, people whose plays had been turned down by every theater in New York. She said, ‘I’m excited by what you folks are doing, and I’m going to create a lab where we can hear new plays.’”

But Ms. Berezin’s contributions to Circle Rep went much further back than that. Before taking the helm, she had acted in many of its productions and mentored young actors, including Jeff Daniels, who joined the company in 1976.

Ms. Berezin “was the heart of the Circle Rep,” Mr. Daniels said in a phone interview. Before a performance, he recalled, “she had a way of saying that one thing that became the key thought that you would tape to the inside of your forehead and carry with you through the entire play, and it defined the character.”

In 1977, Ms. Berezin appeared with Mr. Daniels in “Brontosaurus,” a one-act play by Mr. Wilson. “We got creamed,” Mr. Daniels said. “Mel Gussow of The Times called me ‘empty as a balloon,’ if I remember correctly, and he wasn’t wrong. I was just beside myself, crushed, like I had been stamped out like a bug. She listened and listened, and what she said to me was, ‘You’re going to have to learn how to deal with other people’s jealousy.’”

Harriet Fayne Berezin was born on March 25, 1941, in Philadelphia, the only child of Maurice Berezin, an owner of men’s clothing stores, and Bettye (Shifrin) Berezin, who managed the home.

Drawn to the stage from an early age, she was active in theater in high school and went on to study theater at Boston University. A director in a college production nicknamed her Tanya after observing her skill at interpreting Chekhov and others, and the name stuck.

She moved to New York in 1963 to chase her acting dreams and quickly became entrenched in the experimental theater scene flourishing in downtown Manhattan cauldrons of creativity like La MaMa and Caffe Cino.

She became close with Mr. Wilson, Mr. Mason and Rob Thirkield, with whom she formed the Circle Theater Company, as it was originally known, in 1969. She married Mr. Thirkield that year.

In 1974, the company settled in the Sheridan Square Playhouse, located in a former garage in Greenwich Village. That same year, Mr. Gussow of The Times hailed it as “the chief provider of new American plays to the New York commercial theater.”

Ms. Berezin also acted on television and in film into the mid-2000s. She was seen on shows like “St. Elsewhere” and “The Equalizer” and in films including “Awakenings,” with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Jonathan Thirkield, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 1986.

Despite its creative triumphs during her years as artistic director, Circle Rep continued to struggle financially. Ms. Berezin left her post in 1994 and for more than two decades worked as an acting coach. The company closed in 1996.

Upon leaving the company, Ms. Berezin told The Times of her plans to appear in a pilot for a series that Montel Williams was trying to get off the ground. Her role? A high school principal in Chicago.

“It’s a lot like running a nonprofit,” she said. “Typecasting, don’t you think?”

“Gutenberg! The Musical!,” a comic meta-musical about two talentless dolts pitching a show about the father of the printing press, wraps up its limited Broadway run on Jan. 28.

Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells (reprising their “Book of Mormon” buddy act), the show has drawn mixed reviews and strong box-office returns. But even before it opened, its mere existence on Broadway sent book and library nerds vibrating with anticipation and a bit of disbelief.

There have also been grumblings from some traditionalists (of the rare book, not the Rodgers and Hammerstein, variety), along with some resignation. Well, why not a musical about Johannes Gutenberg? If Broadway can turn a semi-overlooked founding father like Alexander Hamilton into a household name and cultural hero, why should the guy whose invention helped jump-start mass literacy throw away his shot?

Hamilton had some big fat biographies on his side. But as Gad’s character in the show notes, Wikipedia (correctly) declares records of Gutenberg’s life “scant.”

Here is a primer for those who, even after seeing the show, might be left wondering: “Guten-Who?”

What do we actually know about Johannes Gutenberg?

Born the son of a patrician in the early 15th century, in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg was originally trained as a goldsmith and metallurgist. A few surviving documents suggest that in the 1430s he began secretly developing what would become his famous printing press. His early efforts included some papal indulgences and a grammar book. Then, in late 1454 or early 1455, seemingly out of nowhere, came his monumental two-volume, nearly 1,300-page Bible, with its two columns of 42 lines per page.

Today, specialists describe Gutenberg’s accomplishment precisely. His Bible “was the first substantial book printed in the West from movable type,” George Fletcher, the author of “Gutenberg and the Genesis of Printing,” said during a recent interview at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, where I visited recently for an up-close look at some of Gutenberg’s printing, including loose leaves from his Bible.

So did Gutenberg really “invent” the printing press?

Not exactly — though bringing this up over a pint of mead at the Rusty German, the seedy tavern in the show, might get you in trouble. As far back as the late eighth century, Japanese artisans were mass-printing Buddhist sutras using carved woodblocks. And a form of movable type appeared in China as early as the 11th century, though it’s unclear whether Gutenberg would have known of it, Fletcher said.

Yet the world-altering nature of Gutenberg’s invention lay not in the press, Fletcher said, but in his whole system, starting with the type sorts (as specialists call the individual characters). “What is important is this ability to reuse and reuse and reuse the type sorts, in any combination conceivable,” he said. “You have 26 letters, but you can get millions of combinations out of them. And he figured out how you could do this.”

Did the Gutenberg Bible really help teach Europe’s illiterate masses to read, as the show’s character’s claim?

“There’s a great deal to that,” said Fletcher, a former curator at the New York Public Library (which owns one Gutenberg Bible) and the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan (which has three). Between about 1455 and the end of 1500, roughly 30,000 different editions of printed books appeared, amounting to millions of copies, all over western Europe, and as far as Constantinople. “And by the 1490s, there was all sorts of stuff being cranked out,” he said. “So there was much more material for people who could read or could learn to read and better themselves.”

Did Gutenberg battle the religious authorities?

The musical depicts Gutenberg as locked in a battle with an evil monk, who fears the printing press will loosen the church’s power over the masses.

In reality, some religious readers were highly impressed with Gutenberg’s wares, including the future Pope Pius II, who saw a sample at the Frankfurt Book Fair in early 1455. He wrote excitedly to a cardinal in Rome, praising Gutenberg and his pages, which he declared “exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, such as Your Excellency could read effortlessly without glasses.”

Unfortunately, the future pope noted, the run of roughly 180 copies had already sold out.

Was Gutenberg really in love with a wench named Helvetica, like in the show?

Unlikely. Helvetica is the name of a now-ubiquitous clean-lined typeface created in 1957, which shot to world domination after being selected as a core font in the earliest Macintosh computers. The typeface Gutenberg used, which mimicked the look of calligraphic handwriting, is known as blackletter.

What happened to Gutenberg after his Bible?

Shortly after the book was announced for sale, he had a dispute with one of his funders and lost his press. “He got thrown out of the business, just at the point of success,” Fletcher said. Gutenberg died in 1468, at around the age of 70. His gravesite is unknown. A history of the world published in 1482 by William Caxton, the first printer in Britain, omitted his name but noted the revolutionary technology born in Mainz, saying, “the craft is multiplied throughout the world, and books be had cheap, and in great number.”

Where can I buy a Gutenberg Bible?

Sorry, you’re out of luck! The last one to come up for auction, in 1978, fetched $2.2 million, roughly $10 million in today’s dollars. Today, all 49 of the substantially complete Gutenberg Bibles known to survive are in institutional collections.

Single leaves, known in the trade as Noble Fragments, do come up for sale and cost roughly $70,000 to $100,000, a bit higher if on vellum rather than paper, said Selby Kiffer, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s. (The Grolier owns several Gutenberg leaves and other fragments.) If a whole Bible should come to market, Kiffer estimated, the price would be a record-obliterating $60 million to $80 million.

Yet the remarkable thing about Gutenberg’s work may not be its rarity, but its enduring familiarity. “We may be in a digital world now, but from 1455 to today, the book as a technology hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “And certainly, the craftsmanship hasn’t improved since Gutenberg.”

Are there any other early printers ripe for a Broadway close-up?

The best bet is probably Aldus Manutius, a leading printer in late-15th-century Venice, where the center of printing innovation moved a decade after Gutenberg. Aldus pioneered the printing of portable, relatively affordable editions of classics, which transformed personal reading. He was the first to print editions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus and Sophocles; the first to use italic type; and the first to use the semicolon in its modern sense.

Aldus was a famously irascible character. And if you believe Robin Sloan’s 2012 novel, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop,” he was also the founder of the Unbroken Spine, a secret society of bibliophiles locked in a 21st-century existential showdown with Google over the soul of humanity.

But then, why not believe it? As Gad’s character puts it in the show, historical fiction is “fiction that’s true.”

“These people are not drunk,” a choir in quirkily customized blue robes sang on Saturday, “because it’s nine in the morning.”

Watching these smiling performers in the light-flooded Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, I was surprised to discover that this startlingly contemporary sentence was a translation of a biblical verse, Acts 2:15. And it was an appropriate sentiment at, yes, about 9 a.m.

In “Terce,” presented as part of this year’s Prototype festival of new opera and music theater, about three dozen choir members were praying, as Christians have done at that hour from the era of the early church. The work adapts and takes its name from the traditional liturgy for 9 o’clock, the time when the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared to the apostles on Pentecost.

In Brooklyn, there’s a twist, if not a wholly unfamiliar one: The divinity being celebrated in this folk-soul-gospel-medieval amalgam is, according to the script, a woman, a mother, “an undeniably female creator.”

Politically charged, scrappy, stirring, deeply earnest: “Terce,” created and led by Heather Christian, embodies Prototype, now in its 11th season and organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, the arts center in SoHo. (The festival runs through Sunday.)

The hourlong performance had the intimacy that is crucial to this year’s best festival offerings. The members of the community choir that Christian has organized sing, dance and play instruments only steps from the audience that surrounds them. And, whether it’s the cold weather or the constant bad news, that closeness feels sweet and reassuring this January.

It’s sweet and reassuring, too, in even cozier confines at HERE, where Prototype is presenting “The Promise,” a rock-cabaret song cycle that Wende, a Dutch singer, conceived with a group of collaborators.

Among those creators is the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, perhaps best known for scoring her sister Phoebe’s hit TV show “Fleabag.” And the lyrics of “The Promise” — the work of five writers — do reflect a kind of “Fleabag” sensibility. They are the voice of a modern woman, single, funny, dissatisfied, morbid, ambivalent at best about having children, prickly yet vulnerable. “I’m a lonely bitch,” goes one song’s rueful refrain.

Restlessly stalking the tiny space and moving among the three other musicians, Wende has a mischievous grin that can swiftly give way to sneering anger and quiet despair. Her voice is tautly powerful yet quivering, a little like Fiona Apple’s — sometimes sultry, sometimes airy and wry. With resourcefully varied lighting by Freek Ros, the 19-song, 100-minute cycle keeps shifting its tone and pace; songs with pounding, propulsive jungle beats exist alongside vocals half-spoken to a piano.

If the final minutes come close to being cloying without quite tipping over, they have that in common with “Terce.” But just as the physical proximity of the performers feels welcome this season, some sentimentality does, too. Wende somehow manages to create that rarity: anthemic crowd singalongs that even a hardened critic feels compelled to join.

“The Promise” and “Terce,” the Prototype presentations that are sticking with me most this year, are both plotless and characterless. Also leaning abstract, but in a far wilder and more surreal mode, is “Chornobyldorf,” a sprawling production of well over two intermissionless hours at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. It has bravely traveled from Ukraine as a kind of nostalgic reminder of the loud, messy, nudity-filled, often self-serious, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.

The many-page synopsis describes a convoluted genesis for this “archaeological opera in seven novels,” created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. But the premise is similar to “Station Eleven,” the book turned TV show, and the play “Mr. Burns”: After an apocalypse — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the specter here — a society tries to rise from the ashes though whatever fragments of culture remain.

In the case of “Chornobyldorf,” this takes the form of revived yet still-distant memories of Baroque opera and polyphonic chant, shot through with eruptions of blastingly amplified punkish rage. The texts are difficult to decipher. The costumes are cut in ornate antique styles, but dolled up with bits of electrical wiring, and the instruments, many hand-built, are seemingly a collection of whatever was left over when the world ended: percussion, trombone, fluegelhorn, flute, folk string instruments like the bandura and dulcimer, sighing accordions.

The sonic landscape creaks and roars, squeals and simmers, as this little society puts on eerily robotic, intensely solemn rituals, building to a screaming Mass and a climactic, hysterical danse macabre around a huge medallion of Lenin hanging from the ceiling. On a screen behind the performers, film footage pans through outdoor scenes, with nature looking majestic — and almost entirely abandoned by humans.

The slow, stylized pace and insular symbolism, together with the vivid film element and arcane eroticism, evokes Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle. And though the work is baggy, a dreamlike atmosphere takes hold; it’s hard to tell the exact meaning of a statuesque naked woman being stripped of the cymbals that hang from her arms, but the sequence is nevertheless arresting.

“Adoration” is the most standard-issue, proscenium-theater opera Prototype is presenting this year. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the 90-minute piece — being performed at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan — trudges through a complicated plot involving a teenage boy’s announcement to his classmates that his father is a terrorist. (It turns out he’s not telling the truth, though to what narrative or emotional end is never quite clear.)

Setting the story to music offers the promise of delving into the nuances of a group of troubled people. But the drearily expository monologues go on and on in Royce Vavrek’s leaden libretto. And while Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score offers some sinuous music for string quartet, its fevered quality feels generic and eventually tiresome; the drama, shapeless.

More compelling than any character in “Adoration” is Dominic Shodekeh Talifero, the performer-protagonist of “Vodalities,” one of Prototype’s three short, online streaming offerings — and he doesn’t even speak words or sing pitches.

Joined for the piece’s 16 minutes by the quartet So Percussion, he virtuosically yet subtly explores what he calls breath art, a delicate form of beat-boxing that inevitably, painfully suggests the Black Lives Matter rallying cry “I can’t breathe.” (The other digital presentations are “Swann,” a longing aria based on the true story of a 19th-century Black man who wore drag, and the antic, voice-processed “Whiteness.)

Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, delves into the dark history of American discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom were processed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

The 90-minute work’s structure is elegant: Sections of historical narration, as in a Ken Burns documentary, alternate with poetic pieces for chorus, with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street singing the words of writings found on the walls of the island’s immigrant processing center. Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.

The slow-burning patience of Huang’s score is a virtue, even if the sections tend to linger too long — particularly the nonchoral ones, with the narration on top of a string quartet sawing away as accompaniment to balletically aggressive duets for two dancers, an Asian woman and white man.

But the gradual build to a hypnotic conclusion was moving, with choral repetitions as relentless as waves on a beach, punctuated by the slow, steady beat of a gong. It was reminiscent of “Terce,” which ends with the metallic shimmer of a gently shaken chandelier made of keys and cutlery.

There was a sense, in both finales, of the potential of music and performance — of community — to cleanse. To help us both remember and move forward.

Critic’s Pick

‘Open Mic Night’

Through Jan. 18 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 50 minutes.

For about two-thirds of Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s new show, “Open Mic Night,” Weiss alternated between reminiscing about a now-closed space and asking audience members a series of rapid-fire questions, like “Vipers or moles?” “Vacation or voting?” Mounsey was sitting behind a laptop, which she used to drop sound cues, and the blinding house lights remained on as Weiss engaged in crowd work.

Suddenly, Weiss said: “I’m tired of playing this character. Hi, I’m the real Peter now.” But then the house lights went down and a spotlight went up, and he was holding a mic, looking like a stand-up comedian in full performance mode. What was real? What was pretend? The duo seemed to be slyly reminding us that maybe a stage is not a place where we should expect authenticity. Plus, what does that even mean?

Since their 2019 show “[50/50] old school animation,” Mounsey and Weiss have emerged as perhaps the most bracing theatermakers in New York City, a reputation confirmed in 2021 with “While You Were Partying” at Soho Rep. “Open Mic Night,” which runs through Jan. 18 and is being presented by Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York as part of this year’s Under the Radar festival, confirms that they are not so much about cringe as they are about questioning the relationship between artist and audience. (Nathan Fielder fans should take note.) During the round of questions, Weiss asked a woman, “Do you trust me?” After she said yes, he flatly said: “Interesting.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

Critic’s Pick

‘Search Party’

Through Jan. 13 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 1 hour.

Inua Ellams prefaced “Search Party,” his winkingly titled, warmly revivifying Under the Radar show in the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center, with a couple of friendly disclaimers.

First, it isn’t a theater piece. Most of it would depend on the audience giving him words to type into a tablet computer full of his poetry, essays and other texts, and him reading what came up in the search results.

Second, its success would hinge on us.

“If it is brilliant it is because of your word choices, and if it is terrible it is your fault,” he said, teasingly, on Saturday night. “Collective responsibility.”

The audience I saw “Search Party” with acquitted itself glowingly.

Ellams, a Nigerian-born British playwright and poet, is best known to New York audiences for his plays “Barber Shop Chronicles” and “The Half-God of Rainfall,” but “Search Party” is more like an unpretentious literary salon that’s also a politically minded hang.

Seated on a couch, gesturing gracefully with the hand that wasn’t holding the tablet, he read us a long, soul-baring essay addressed to an ex; a monologue spoken by a food delivery person whom Ellams hopes to work into a play (yes, please); a meditation on why he writes. Themes that drive his work recurred: immigration, belonging, xenophobia; community, language, culture.

It’s a luxury to hear Ellams in this 120-seat space — and an affordable one, as part of Lincoln Center’s choose-what-you-pay program. You can hand over just $5 if you like, and pick any seat.

I highly recommend. Go hang with him. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Exponential Festival

“Being Up in Here,” through Jan. 13 at the Brick, Brooklyn. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. “Two Sisters,” through Jan. 13 at the Loading Dock, Brooklyn. Running time: 1 hour. theexponentialfestival.org

Playing best friends Aaliyah and Eli, Alexis L. Dobynes and Aja Downing are in motion for most of “Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses That Don’t Concern You or When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do?” Sometimes they jog, sometimes they walk briskly. They get around and even make it to space, though how and why we end up there is unclear — the show, which is written and directed by Marissa Joyce Stamps, uses four treadmills to keep the actresses moving, but the show’s preferred mode is elliptical.

“Being Up in Here,” at the Brick until Jan. 13, is part of the Exponential Festival, which focuses on emerging artists with an experimental bent and makes the concurrent Under the Radar look downright Broadway-ready. The production, like many at this festival, prefers the cryptic to the obvious, and accepting those terms is crucial to the experience.

A ​​recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Playwriting Award/New Dramatists Residency, Stamps seems to have an interest in physicality and athleticism — her previous show at Exponential, “Blue Fire Burns the Hottest,” featured a center-stage ring and two men in boxing trunks. But here it’s the language that’s muscular in a series of scenes that Dobynes and Downing dig into with shared relish and distinct styles — the first deceptively soft-spoken, the second deceptively bold.

Also part of Exponential and produced in partnership with the esteemed incubator New Georges, Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams’s joyously, shambolically silly “Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods” is similarly all over the map, with no helpful GPS for the audience. Our hosts, Bailey and Emma (portrayed by the playwrights), bounce from goofy science-fiction references to a conventional but still funny satire of performance art, and from erotica parodies to knowing jokes about lesbian culture. The latter include a set (conceived with input from the designer Normandy Sherwood) of cardboard boxes bearing labels like “Butch heiresses” and “Dykes (concept/lumber),” and readings of testimonies from star lesbians that, at the performance I attended, included Bette Porter, Lydia Tár and Timothée Chalamet.

Directed by Tara Elliott, the show, which is at Loading Dock in Brooklyn through Jan. 13, may feel like an inconsequential lark, but we are in no position to sniff at a fun hour of theater. “Two Sisters” also confirms that Horwitz (whose dark comedy “Mary Gets Hers” had a nice buzz last fall) and Williams (“Events”) are singing an offbeat tune, and we need to hear more of it. VINCENTELLI