David Levine's 'Habit': A play, an environment, a social commentary:
David Levine's latest performance, Habit, has actors running through the same play for eight hours daily, with stunning, politically inflected results.
Bio: Joseph Cermatori is assistant editor and staff writer at PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. He is also currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Columbia University.
David Levine’s Habit stages the most deliberately conventional of plays within a set of totally unconventional contexts: an art installation in a warehouse gallery space. The play, titled Children of Kings, is by one of the leading lights of the downtown playwriting scene, Jason Grote, and was written specifically for Habit. There's no unit-set living room built on a proscenium stage. Instead the house is a fully three-dimensional, free-standing structure installed in the Lower East Side’s Essex Street Market. The structure is stocked with everything required for the play to unfold, and from within this enclosure, the actors perform the 90-minute play repeatedly for eight hours at a time. More
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on September 28th, 2012 2:36pmAgainst this backdrop, Playwrights Horizons is presenting Detroit, a new play by downtown stalwart Lisa D’Amour, directed by Anne Kauffman. With its action set in a suburb outside a mid-sized American city—“[n]ot necessarily Detroit”—D’Amour juxtaposes the specific fate of Motor City against the allegorical space of Anycity, USA, recalling the chilling prophesy of former Detroit mayor Coleman Young: “Detroit today is your town tomorrow.” More
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on September 20th, 2012 10:36amLast night, Miller kicked off its 2012-13 season with a staged concert by the French early music ensemble Le Poème Harmonique, giving lovers of baroque music and opera a reason to celebrate. The program, entitled Venezia: from the Streets to the Palaces, is billed as the group’s “largest New York production to date,” and offers an opportunity for New Yorkers to get to know one of Europe’s most exciting early music ensembles on intimate terms. More
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on September 13th, 2012 3:53pmThen there are the older festivals that feel new precisely because they’ve managed to remain so effectively under the radar. This was my experience attending the seventh annual Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival at the East 13th Street Theatre (a.k.a. Classic Stage Company’s usual theatre space) on Thursday night (performances continue through Saturday night). The Weasel Festival grew out of Brooklyn College’s playwriting M.F.A. program, and promises its attendees a chance to catch some of the city’s rising stars while they are still on the ascent. More
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on August 10th, 2012 3:42pmIn this respect, the production has something to say to the current political-economic moment in Europe and the United States. If, in 2001, the production staged a generational revolt against the legacy of Communism in Eastern Europe, in its present context it resonates more directly with an age coming to awareness of the excesses and exploitations of its own wealthy capitalist patriarchs. Here, the question of what we willingly excuse so the party can continue unimpeded once again comes to the fore. When Helge’s forced, public confession is followed almost immediately by a scene of the party guests dancing, we have the sense that something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark. More
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on April 27th, 2012 12:31pmThe seventeenth-century English playwright John Ford is currently enjoying a real moment in the New York theater. One month after Theatre for a New Audience staged his bloody tragedy The Broken Heart at the Duke on 42nd Street, another of Ford’s plays has opened in a new production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This time, it’s his most famous work, the equally grisly 'Tis Pity She’s A Whore, presented by the British company Cheek by Jowl under the direction of Declan Donnellan. More
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on March 22nd, 2012 2:33pm
