Summary
A trio of one-act plays exploring the raw and uncomfortable moments of human connection. Three distinct stories about desire, relationships, and the lives we inhabit.
Sunday, April 27, 2025 Apr 27, 2025
I just love what these folks are doing. If you don’t know them, look them up - they run indie shows and classes in found spaces in Bushwick and the production quality is seriously impressive. (They send you the location the day before the show.)
This was the last performance of “Other People’s Lives,” which staples together three plays riffing on the transitivity of relationships. We’re all interconnected, and the things I say and do to you influence (often subconsciously) what you say and do to me and other people in the future. That can certainly be bad - we see a few examples of people getting hurt and paying it forward. But it can also be very good, and we get a thoughtful counter example of what happens when someone receives a little unexpected kindness.
The curation effort is impressive; I walked out (mistakenly) thinking that the plays had been written to a prompt for this production. Each play starts with the reunion of characters who haven’t seen each other in some time and has a significant twist that changes our perception of a character. There’s recurring symbolism in the form of recording devices as memory. All three plays seem to be set in a place much like here in a time much like now.
It’s cool seeing the three plays staged in rapid succession. They rearranged the set and moved some audience members to keep the staging fresh each time. Things in the room - doors, stairs, props - are used and later reused for other purposes.
If there’s one thing that I think holds the show back, it’s that the quality of the plays is a tiny bit uneven, which is to say that I was lukewarm on the dialogue in one of them but quite liked the other two.