Before the city had more festivals on the cultural calendar than a convention of Cinderellas, Kristin Marting, co-founder and artistic director of HERE, created a new performance concept called the American Living Room. This was 18 years ago, but the reasons for the festival then are the same as they are now—to promote interesting and experimental work in a comfortable setting. So comfortable that the audience seating is largely made up of sofas, club chairs and recliners.
This year’s American Living Room is a particularly long one—running through Sept. 2, it’s 38 days worth of new material on a dizzying spectrum of ideas and themes. Glancing at the synopses on HERE’s website, some pieces seem like a tease: Peter McCabe’s In the Company of Trees, which “examines things that are real, cannot be perceived through the senses, but can be understood in a theater;” Vangeline Theater’s Voom, which “rescues the camp, extravagant elements from Robert Wilson’s Voom portraits.”
Other works are astonishingly topical, like Jamie Lyn Smith’s comedic Free and Compulsory: My Year in Education, which focuses on a first-year teacher in one of the worst high schools in Gotham. In Floating Brothel, set in 1789 and performed by an ensemble of actors on a 3-foot by 6-foot stage, “a 13-year-old prostitute, a savvy con artist and a fallen maidservant are shipped to a male penal colony,” while Joanne Hudson’s Pop Art is naturally inspired by Andy Warhol. There’s also the Human Company’s Schiele, about “tortured artist” Egon Schiele; excerpts from The Passion of Saint Thomas More, Garrett Fisher’s new opera; and West Hyler and Tim J. Lord’s “We Declare You a Terrorist,” just for a dose of something uneasily political.
Through Sept. 2. HERE, 145 6th Ave. (enter at Dominick St.), 212-352-3101, www.here.org.
