New York is expensive for business owners (ok, and everybody else), and this can ring especially true for those who run performance spaces. Indeed, commercial successes like Hamilton could lure the ignorant into the sense that it’s very feasible to make live theater work with a long and lucrative life. But that runs contrary to the climate that the smaller spaces and companies exist in, even when they’re the ones creating and initially developing the work that goes on to find success. More →
indie theater
A Playwright Returns to the East Village Theater Where He Once Squatted

J.Stephen Brantley (L) and Nico Grelli (R) (photo: Hunter Canning)
It’s relatively common for people to write plays that are autobiographical, and then perform in those plays. Less common is an autobiographical play performed in the same neighborhood where events took place that led the play to happen, and produced by the very person that runs the theater where the writer used to squat. If this sounds a little convoluted, it is. But it’s also the very true nature of J.Stephen Brantley’s new play The Jamb, about two queer punks in their forties: one gone straight-edge, one stuck in the wild days of his youth.
New Play Brings Together Slasher Films and Beckett For Some ‘Blissful Confusion’

“Biter (Every Time I Turn Around)” at Silent Barn (Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)
It’s hard to imagine how Title: Point productions crams not only an audience of up to 40 people into a tiny room (now known as Vital Joint, a black box theater) adjacent to the more familiar space at Silent Barn but also an entire cast, multiple sets, lighting, and crew. Well, things get a little creative. “They stuck me in a hole,” Spencer Thomas Campbell, co-writer of the current production, explained. “I spend the entire show in a hole.” But the challenges of a small space also contribute to keeping things interesting around here. I mean, at what other (serious) play is there a distinct possibility that the audience could get splattered with blood or maybe even puked on?