Last season, the annual Under the Radar Festival (which showcases international, experimental and multidisciplinary theater) was unexpectedly canceled by the Public Theater, its longtime presenter, due to financial issues. In response, the festival was quickly reconceived as a citywide effort involving several other theater companies.
The festival, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, returns this month with productions at theaters across the city through Jan. 19. A complete list of shows and venues is available at utrfest.org.
We asked festival director Mark Russell to talk about some of this year’s shows.
Blind Runner: “I’m really excited about ‘Blind Runner’ by Amir Reza Koohestani, which is going to run for three weeks at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It’s rare to get any performance out of Iran, and I think it’s going to become even more impossible in the future. This is a beautiful, simply told story. It’s only 60 minutes long, but it’s gorgeous and heart-wrenching.”
Show/Boat: A River: “NYU Skirball and Target Margin Theater have been working on this project for a long time. David Herskovits’ work hasn’t been featured in the festival before, and I don’t know of a better director to take on this bombshell of a show, which is now in the public domain. David will honor the material but also make us think about it. We will get the beauty of the music, as well as the challenge of the story and its historical reference.”
The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (Redux): “When we were in the deepest parts of the pandemic, Sinking Ship and Theater in Quarantine made ‘7th Voyage’ in an apartment, in a closet, and then streamed it out to the world. Now they’re doing a longer run, with a live audience, but also with a lot of the visual tricks that they had during quarantine. They’re streaming it as well. You can watch them make it live or you can watch the stream online.”
Marie Antoinette: “Ann Liv Young started out as a very controversial dance artist, and now she’s making this version of the story of Marie Antoinette. It also deals with the edge of madness. Ann has been building this project in her living room. She has actors that have been working with her for a while, and those actors describe themselves as mentally ill.”
Find Your Eyes: “Benji Reid was part of the international hip-hop theater scene back in the nineties. He came over and participated in the Hip-Hop Theater Festival at P.S. 122. He went back to Manchester, his home, and he began to take pictures, and they’re high-art pictures. Major galleries are representing him. This is his story about how he came to photography and how it allied with his life in hip-hop. It’s so visually striking because he’s making photographs live onstage, and you’re watching the process in front of you.”
Cuckoo: “Jaha Koo is a young Korean director who’s now working out of Belgium. It’s his first solo piece. He’s programmed three rice cookers to speak back to him. It’s sort of a take on the loneliness of many young men in South Korea and how they cope, and this is his way of coping, by programming these rice cookers to interact with him.”
A Knock on the Roof: “It’s a solo show dealing with bombings in Gaza, but it’s not explicit about that conflict exactly. It’s a woman who knows that when there’s a signal, a knock on the roof, a bomb coming to her building, and she has five minutes to get out of the house. She lives in a walkup, and she has a young child, so she practices obsessively with a bag of books, the weight of her child, to get far enough away from the house within five minutes. It’s about that struggle. It’s about the struggle to survive in these mad times. It’s an amazing story.”
Soho Rep is Not a Building: “Soho Rep is one of the beloved downtown theater companies. It has a long legacy of doing great work, and they worked out of a very small storefront loft in Soho for a long time, but it’s not exactly ADA compliant. So they’re giving up the lease and going to be in residence at Playwrights Horizons. This event is saying goodbye to that beloved space. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be one all-night party. It could be people writing things on the walls. Who knows? It’s just a loving tribute to the legacy of Soho Rep and the legacy of that room. We are losing so many of these great rooms, and it’s another example of how that impacts the field.”
The Dan Daw Show: “Dan Daw is a gentleman from Manchester who is differently abled. He’s dealing with some physical complications, but he’s also a queer masochist. This is a very relaxed performance. You can walk in and out if you want. You can eat, and drink beer. There’s a special room you can go to if it gets too noisy for you or if it starts to trigger you. In the end, ‘The Dan Daw Show’ is about humanity, freedom, and love, powerful and moving.”
