Arts Brief: Plenty for Twenty

“It’s back!” screams the promotional material for 20 at 20, a twice-annual bargain-basement sale of tickets for more than 20 Off-Broadway shows—you can pay $20 for any seat still available at the box-office 20 minutes before the curtain rises—that runs from Sept. 2 through Sept. 14. This deep ducat discounting is a good thing, of course, but what does $20 get you? Surely it can’t get you the whole show, right?

It’s kind of a scary idea. Let’s say you decide to stop by New World Stages 20 minutes before the lights rise on Naked Boys Singing! For $20, do you get to watch the full warbling monty? Yes, no matter how cost effective it would be to use a mute waif with a fig leaf.

And while this blowout does offer full shows for $20, it would be easy to imagine what a lesser event might provide. Picture a ride on the subway down to Webster Hall to catch a performance of The Awesome ’80s Prom, for example. Would you enter, for $20, a world of new wave and retro? No. You’d bump into a 40-year-old Madonna wannabe with an asymmetrical fade haircut. Walk over to the Orpheum Theatre for a $20 ticket for Stomp, and you’d watch a severely undernourished illegal alien thwacking a Nerf ball against a floorboard. Head back uptown to the Snapple Theater Center for a $20 ticket for The Fantasticks, and after you cough up $25 for a lukewarm Snapple, you’d get to watch the opening number—“Try to Remember”—before being forcibly ejected by the same mute waif wearing a fig leaf that you saw earlier. Mildly poetic, that.

For $20 at Altar Boyz, you would get a tranny in a tank top explaining what vespers is. For $20 at A Brush with Georgia O’Keefe, you would get a coloring book and a copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. And for $20 at My First Time, instead of watching actors recite tales of people losing their virginity, the crumpled-up program would omit the cast list and all other members of the creative team. Instead, a single sentence in a large font would encourage you to become reacquainted with your right hand. For $25, however, a fine-looking toothless gentleman in the lobby would be available to assist you. Repeatedly.