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For the 20th consecutive year, experimental theater festival Under the Radar is presenting an array of challenging, imaginative work across New York City. The UTR slate includes developmental series “Under Construction,” where work-in-progress pieces invite audiences in to help figure out what’s working—and what’s not.
For composing duo The Lazours, “Under Construction” is a welcome step along the journey of new show Night Side Songs. When you’re crafting an interactive, singalong musical about illness that toys with the fourth wall and includes historical “visions” from time past alongside a modern story, a bit of development time is helpful.
Through this Sunday you can help the whole team behind Night Side Songs, directed by Taibi Magar and presented ar Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theatre, discover their show.
The Lazours made a splash in New York last fall with We Live In Cairo, the pair’s acclaimed new musical about student activists caught up in the Arab Spring uprisings. After its UTR run, Night Side Songs goes on to full productions at the Philadelphia Theater Company in February, then Boston’s American Repertory Theater in March.
Broadway veterans Mary Testa, Taylor Trensch, Jordan Dobson, Brooke Ishibashi and Jonathan Ravivi perform the gentle, surprisingly joyous new work. Theatrely caught up with The Lazour siblings in between rehearsals.
How did Night Side Songs first begin? What was the initial impetus for the piece?
DANIEL LAZOUR: We read this book called The Death of Cancer about some of the first chemotherapy trials at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland in the 1960s. We actually met one of the authors of the book, crazily enough, Vincent T. DeVita.
PATRICK LAZOUR: At the Yale Club. But we couldn’t go up, because we had jeans on.
DANIEL: So we set out to write a musical about the first chemotherapists. And it’s a fascinating story. But we found that, A) that wasn’t where we were at artistically; and B), that when we told people we were writing about chemo, everyone would immediately go into their personal stories. We realized that the only way to write a show about cancer is to involve everybody—patients, nurses, caregivers, doctors. That’s what led us ultimately to this communal experience.
PATRICK: It intersected with a time in our lives when people very close to us, in our family, were going through the illness journey. One after another, we experienced the closed rooms of that journey. Armed with that, and armed with the information we had, we wanted to create something that had more to do with the whole community that forms [around the ill].
How early in the process did you know that the piece would involve communal singing?
PATRICK: Back when we did the first production of We Live In Cairo at A.R.T. in 2019, one of the songs, “Genealogy of the Revolution,” was sort of outside space and time. So we were like, “What if we did it as a singalong with the audience?” It acted as a ritual, a way to bring people into the space. We got rid of that during the New York Theatre Workshop production, but it inspired us to create a communal singing experience in this show.
DANIEL: We set out to write simple music, simple folk songs that people can latch onto after one listen. That was the musical challenge of the show. [Songwriter and music director] Madeline Benson was an incredible help in that. We did a lot of development of this singalong idea on her front porch in Long Island City. We’d invite people over and just see what worked. See what it took to get people to sing along!
PATRICK: It so varies by night. You saw it last night, right Joey?
I did, yeah.
PATRICK: I feel like last night, people were so hesitant to sing. We’re making all these changes to try and blur the fourth wall, like keeping the lights up, just to invite people in more. You’re chasing it, always. That’s part of the development.
It would sound to me like everyone was singing, everyone was joining in—but then I’d look around and realize oh, that guy is not, that person is not…
DANIEL: And we want to create an environment where that’s okay. You’re not gonna be kicked out if you don’t want to sing. One of the missions of the piece is to make something participatory that isn’t cringeworthy. As theater people, there’s nothing we hate more than being singled out.
Especially given the subject matter, you want to be humane about it. Nearly everyone has some kind of experience with illness or death, and it can bring up a lot of intense emotions.
PATRICK: It’s such a fine line. We want to make sure the songs are speaking to very universal experiences. One of the songs is called “Let’s Go Walking.” For the audience, if they want to take that very simple idea and graft their experience onto it, they can. All of these songs came from conversations we had as part of our research. “Let’s Go Walking” was inspired by one of my mom’s very good friends, who actually passed away four months after we chatted with her. And she said, “Walking was huge, because it was a distraction for me, I’d just walk with people to distract myself.”
The illness journey isn’t something we talk about much, even though we’ve all been through some version of it. We leave it in those “closed rooms,” like you said. How did you think about delving into these tough moments while creating a joyous show, which it is?
DANIEL: There is something heart-forward about the show. This is not gonna be “cool,” we’re not trying to be cool about it. It has this plainness to it, so that you can graft your own experience and take from it what you want. It’s sort of a service-oriented piece of theater.
PATRICK: The “visions” help when it’s a little too much, they hopefully will put up the wall for a moment. Like, oh, here’s a musical moment! It helps people be like, okay, let me take a break. While we listen to Mary Testa.
Always happy to listen to Mary Testa.
PATRICK: Exactly. But then we’ll come back, and provoke a little bit more of your experience with these singalong moments.
The visions put a context around everything our main character is going through. There’s all these other stories that inform why our illness journey today looks the way it does today.
DANIEL: We do still have this moralistic approach to illness. It’s not, “May God intercede and remove this tumor” anymore, but we do still say, “There’s a reason why this happened, there’s a reason for the universe.” And then we can continue and go on with our day once we put something in its correct box.
How will you be making changes to break down the fourth wall a little more, put people at ease?
PATRICK: There was a little bit of an arms-crossed thing last night.
DANIEL: There was a lot of leaning in. From our workshops, we’re used to a lot of musical theater people belting their face off.
Something I found effective was, any time I stopped singing and then noticed that Mary Testa was looking right at me. That would get me to start singing again.
PATRICK: Exactly. Mary Testa is the “dom” energy of our cast.
Night Side Songs continues through January 19 as part of Under the Radar.
.jpeg)
For the 20th consecutive year, experimental theater festival Under the Radar is presenting an array of challenging, imaginative work across New York City. The UTR slate includes developmental series “Under Construction,” where work-in-progress pieces invite audiences in to help figure out what’s working—and what’s not.
For composing duo The Lazours, “Under Construction” is a welcome step along the journey of new show Night Side Songs. When you’re crafting an interactive, singalong musical about illness that toys with the fourth wall and includes historical “visions” from time past alongside a modern story, a bit of development time is helpful.
Through this Sunday you can help the whole team behind Night Side Songs, directed by Tabi Magar and presented ar Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theatre, discover their show.
The Lazours made a splash in New York last fall with We Live In Cairo, the pair’s acclaimed new musical about student activists caught up in the Arab Spring uprisings. After its UTR run, Night Side Songs goes on to full productions at the Philadelphia Theater Company in February, then Boston’s American Repertory Theater in March.
Broadway veterans Mary Testa, Taylor Trensch, Jordan Dobson, Brooke Ishibashi and Jonathan Ravivi perform the gentle, surprisingly joyous new work. Theatrely caught up with The Lazour siblings in between rehearsals.
How did Night Side Songs first begin? What was the initial impetus for the piece?
DANIEL LAZOUR: We read this book called The Death of Cancer about some of the first chemotherapy trials at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland in the 1960s. We actually met one of the authors of the book, crazily enough, Vincent T. DeVita.
PATRICK LAZOUR: At the Yale Club. But we couldn’t go up, because we had jeans on.
DANIEL: So we set out to write a musical about the first chemotherapists. And it’s a fascinating story. But we found that, A) that wasn’t where we were at artistically; and B), that when we told people we were writing about chemo, everyone would immediately go into their personal stories. We realized that the only way to write a show about cancer is to involve everybody—patients, nurses, caregivers, doctors. That’s what led us ultimately to this communal experience.
PATRICK: It intersected with a time in our lives when people very close to us, in our family, were going through the illness journey. One after another, we experienced the closed rooms of that journey. Armed with that, and armed with the information we had, we wanted to create something that had more to do with the whole community that forms [around the ill].
How early in the process did you know that the piece would involve communal singing?
PATRICK: Back when we did the first production of We Live In Cairo at A.R.T. in 2019, one of the songs, “Genealogy of the Revolution,” was sort of outside space and time. So we were like, “What if we did it as a singalong with the audience?” It acted as a ritual, a way to bring people into the space. We got rid of that during the New York Theatre Workshop production, but it inspired us to create a communal singing experience in this show.
DANIEL: We set out to write simple music, simple folk songs that people can latch onto after one listen. That was the musical challenge of the show. [Songwriter and music director] Madeline Benson was an incredible help in that. We did a lot of development of this singalong idea on her front porch in Long Island City. We’d invite people over and just see what worked. See what it took to get people to sing along!
PATRICK: It so varies by night. You saw it last night, right Joey?
I did, yeah.
PATRICK: I feel like last night, people were so hesitant to sing. We’re making all these changes to try and blur the fourth wall, like keeping the lights up, just to invite people in more. You’re chasing it, always. That’s part of the development.
It would sound to me like everyone was singing, everyone was joining in—but then I’d look around and realize oh, that guy is not, that person is not…
DANIEL: And we want to create an environment where that’s okay. You’re not gonna be kicked out if you don’t want to sing. One of the missions of the piece is to make something participatory that isn’t cringeworthy. As theater people, there’s nothing we hate more than being singled out.
Especially given the subject matter, you want to be humane about it. Nearly everyone has some kind of experience with illness or death, and it can bring up a lot of intense emotions.
PATRICK: It’s such a fine line. We want to make sure the songs are speaking to very universal experiences. One of the songs is called “Let’s Go Walking.” For the audience, if they want to take that very simple idea and graft their experience onto it, they can. All of these songs came from conversations we had as part of our research. “Let’s Go Walking” was inspired by one of my mom’s very good friends, who actually passed away four months after we chatted with her. And she said, “Walking was huge, because it was a distraction for me, I’d just walk with people to distract myself.”
The illness journey isn’t something we talk about much, even though we’ve all been through some version of it. We leave it in those “closed rooms,” like you said. How did you think about delving into these tough moments while creating a joyous show, which it is?
DANIEL: There is something heart-forward about the show. This is not gonna be “cool,” we’re not trying to be cool about it. It has this plainness to it, so that you can graft your own experience and take from it what you want. It’s sort of a service-oriented piece of theater.
PATRICK: The “visions” help when it’s a little too much, they hopefully will put up the wall for a moment. Like, oh, here’s a musical moment! It helps people be like, okay, let me take a break. While we listen to Mary Testa.
Always happy to listen to Mary Testa.
PATRICK: Exactly. But then we’ll come back, and provoke a little bit more of your experience with these singalong moments.
The visions put a context around everything our main character is going through. There’s all these other stories that inform why our illness journey today looks the way it does today.
DANIEL: We do still have this moralistic approach to illness. It’s not, “May God intercede and remove this tumor” anymore, but we do still say, “There’s a reason why this happened, there’s a reason for the universe.” And then we can continue and go on with our day once we put something in its correct box.
How will you be making changes to break down the fourth wall a little more, put people at ease?
PATRICK: There was a little bit of an arms-crossed thing last night.
DANIEL: There was a lot of leaning in. From our workshops, we’re used to a lot of musical theater people belting their face off.
Something I found effective was, any time I stopped singing and then noticed that Mary Testa was looking right at me. That would get me to start singing again.
PATRICK: Exactly. Mary Testa is the “dom” energy of our cast.
Night Side Songs continues through January 19 as part of Under the Radar.
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A husband and wife stand beside each other on a vast, empty stage. They are close enough to touch. Yet an impassable gulf separates the two.
Blind Runner, a gently moving new piece now at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 24 (presented in partnership with Waterwell & Nimruz as part of Under the Radar), uses live video elements to drive that distance home. Intense close-ups of the two performers’ faces are projected onto the back wall, looming large over their small bodies in the Warehouse space. Nothing fancier is needed—the actors’ expressions, filled with pain and desperate longing, do all the work.
Runner is one of several works in New York’s jam-packed January festival season to lean heavily on live video elements and new technologies. Some pieces, like Runner, tie in those tech elements seamlessly with the storytelling, while others deploy these tools more awkwardly—or, in more unfortunate cases, distract from their narrative goals with needless use of artificial intelligence.
Runner uses video with clear purpose. Created by Mehr Theatre Group and performed in Farsi, Amir Reza Koohestani’s play follows an Iranian man’s weekly visits to his wife, a political prisoner held in Tehran. Koohestani’s invasive close-ups (he also directs; video is by Yasi Moradi & Benjamin Krieg) highlight not only the couple’s increasing detachment, but also the daily suffocation of life in a surveillance state. When the couple jogs side by side in a later scene, their bodies blur together on screen like ghosts passing through each other, a simple but stirring effect.
Runner ultimately gets bogged down in melodrama—the husband is pulled into a complicated new relationship that offers intimacy his wife can no longer provide. The dialogue becomes circular, often repetitive. But restrained work by performers Ainaz Azarhoush and Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh keeps the piece grounded, while the use of video always enhances its liveness.
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Back in 2020, when Sinking Ship & Theatre in Quarantine first presented The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy as an online work, I questioned the piece’s “liveness.” Writing for Exeunt, I moaned: “Apparently parts of 7th Voyage were in fact live, but I wouldn’t have known that unless you told me.”
My uncertainty grew out of the show’s premise, which saw space traveler Egon Tichy (Joshua William Gelb) falling into a time vortex and confronting multiple versions of himself. Josh Luxenberg’s script for the dizzying sci-fi farce is sharp and witty, but in its online form, it was hard to say which elements were precisely “live,” and some impact was lost.
The play’s in-person debut, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux] (at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre through February 2, also as part of UTR) seems to exist as a direct response to that precise criticism. On two huge screens, the show plays out just as it did online, save for some tweaks. But at the center of it all is Gelb, in the flesh, hurling himself around that infamous TiQ closet as multiple Tichys.
It’s great fun to watch, even if Luxenberg’s script still sags in its middle section. The greatest delight here is watching Gelb work his magic through a hundred or so seamless scene changes. As with the live Circle Jerk at the Connelly in 2022, you get both the show itself and all of its inner workings—two voyages for the price of one.
Less successful at tying together story and tech is kanishk pandey’s PRISONCORE!, part of The Exponential Festival. (Full context— I saw the show on a night when pandey himself, admirably, stepped into the lead on-book due to cast illness.) This multimedia piece, directed by Rachel Gita Karp and presented at The Brick, begins as the story of a sadistic prison guard named Lucky. In the name of “reform,” Lucky forces his inmates (the audience) to assist his online gambling efforts. After his livestream dealer Rain becomes implicated in Lucky’s cruel antics, the story shifts and becomes hers.
Lucky’s interactions with Rain’s livestream are seamless from a technical standpoint. And certainly pandley’s ideas around the inhumanity of life behind a screen, and the personal prison of a life lived exclusively online, are timely. But his central concept of an online-gaming based prison reform program—however literally we are supposed to take that—is too half-formed and silly for any of these ideas to really gain potency.
In the moments where PRISONCORE! makes (minimal) use of AI imagery, the technology is hardly presented as a boon. New multi-part digital project TECHNE, on the other hand, places generative AI at its core. In the two TECHNE presentations I saw at BAM Fisher (out of four total), where TECHNE runs through January 29 as part of UTR, the results of embracing AI were not encouraging.
Most pointless was “The Vivid Unknown,” a recreation of Godfrey Reggio’s legendary documentary Koyaanisqatsi generated entirely through AI. The whole value of Reggio’s original film, of course, was the painstaking effort of collecting and stitching together hours of time lapse footage filmed across the country. Dumping all that into an AI generator simply produces a far uglier modern imitation of a great work.
More successful was “Voices,” Margarita Athanasiou’s witty video essay tracing the history of mediums and spiritualism in America. This piece’s use of AI imagery was also distracting (and, again, ugly). But when the essay focuses on her grandmother’s obsession with mediums, tying home movie footage in with a historical tapestry, Athanasiou finds—much asthe creators of Runner and Tichy did—that rich, intriguing collision point of technology and storytelling.
Blind Runner continues at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 24. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux] continues at Fourth Street Theatre through Feb 2. TECHNE continues at BAM Fisher through January 19. PRISONCORE! has concluded its run.
