Performance: A Detention Center’s Fate, Improvised Dystopia, Comedic Coconut

THURSDAY

Villa
March 1-April 1 at Wild Project, 7:30 pm: $35 general admission, $15 advance student tickets, $10 rush 

The Wild Project will be hosting The Play Company’s English-language premiere of Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s play Villa. It’s a piece for three actors that places us in a room with three women, who just so happen to be charged with determining the fate of the Villa Grimaldi. The Villa Grimaldi was a significant complex that DINA (the Chilean secret police) used during the Pinochet government to torture and interrogate political prisoners, and was in operation from approximately 1974-1978. What do you do with land that has previously been used for cruelty? The play originally premiered at the actual site of the now-demolished Villa Grimaldi outside the city of Santiago, which will be an interesting thought to keep in mind when you’re sitting in a comfortable East Village theater watching it now.

The Parsnip Ship Presents: Everyone is an Astronaut
Thursday, March 2 at Cloud City, 7 pm: FREE

The Parsnip Ship, while not to my knowledge involving any actual parsnips, is a monthly theater podcast hosted by Iyvon Edebiri and Eric Borlaug that features a full-length play reading by an emerging or established playwright accompanied by music from a local artist, all recorded live for an audience. Lately they’ve been doin’ their thing at Williamsburg spot Cloud City, and will return this Thursday for a reading of Everyone is an Astronaut, a play by Corey Pajka. It’s set in 1986, and chronicles “a young man obsessed with space” and how chaos in the form of an explosion at a Florida space shuttle changes him. The show’s musical guest will be folk-rock songwriter Abby Ahmad.

FRIDAY

Improvised Dystopia Movie
Friday, March 3 at Reckless Theater, 10 pm: $8

When you think of improv, I can only assume wacky short-form scenes come to mind. If those have grown stale in your head and you’re seeking something more terrifying, perhaps improv team Bronson’s latest show could be the made-up thing for you. The group has allowed itself an entire hour to create a live dystopian special, reminiscent of The Hunger Games, V For Vendetta, and other such fictions. And yes, the whole thing will be improvised. Granted, it’s not particularly hard to imagine a whole host of horrors that could be unleashed on our fine citizens and/or world nowadays, so I’m sure the folks of Bronson will have a lot to work with. Let’s just hope it’s not too real.

SATURDAY

Frontieres Sans Frontieres
March 1-18 at The Bushwick Starr, 8 pm: $18-20

This play by Philip Howze, who has also worked in human rights and education, features three orphaned/displaced youths who find that their mischief-filled routine has begun to be challenged. Though this sounds like it could be intense and/or a bummer, the show is described as a “comic spectacle.” In a statement about the show, Howze states that the play came from two different motivating points: “a desire to write a clown parade,” and questions of what his “own complicity in the enterprises of imperialism” has been. Though it seems like these are two disparate notions, it seems they could mesh together quite nicely.

SUNDAY

Coconut
Sunday, March 5 at Starr Bar, 8 pm:  FREE

We have waited for so long, supposedly. And at long last, it is finally here. Aren’t you glad? Yes, it’s Coconut. What coconut, you ask? Coconut, of course. A coconut of comedy plucked gently from the tree by Ana Fabrega and a nice crop of special guests. This coconut is part of Sundays With Ana, a monthly series of themed-ish comedy shows hosted by Ana Fabrega. If you look closely, the individual hairs on this coconut could start to resemble the comedic stylings of Jo Firestone, Hamm, Martin Urbano, Sarah Sherman, Ruby McCollister, and Brian Fiddyment.