from mongolia to mannahatta: back in the new york groove

Camels (and cows, yaks, gazelles, sheep, goats, and horses) put on quite a show in Mongolia (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

My wife and I recently spent several amazing weeks in Mongolia, traveling across vast mountain landscapes and through the Gobi Desert, sleeping in tents and gers (as well as a hotel), and seeing far more yaks, camels, horses, sheep, goats, cows, and gazelles than people.

In the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, which is so spread out it is not a place for walking, there was crazy traffic, making it difficult to get anywhere easily. It’s a young country, establishing itself as an independent, sovereign nation in 1992, so it’s still developing its infrastructure and its artistic culture — film, contemporary art, theater, comedy, modern dance — after decades under China and the Soviet Union.

It took a bit of time for me to get back in the New York groove, having really adapted to the calm, slower pace of Mongolia, where no one, certainly outside of the main city, is ever in a rush. But I knew I was finally back last weekend, experiencing a day that could only happen in Gotham.

I spent the morning working from home on a half-day summer Friday; I’m an executive managing editor for a prestigious children’s book publisher. After my four-hour stint on the company laptop, I picked up lunch and wrote a theater review. Then I really kicked into gear.

Theatre for One connects one audience member and one actor at a time at the Signature (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the late afternoon I headed over to the Signature Theatre on West Forty-Second St., where Theatre for One is presenting “Déjà Vu,” six commissioned microplays between five and twelve minutes each performed by one actor for one audience member at a time, in a converted mobile four-by-eight-foot repurposed equipment container. Theatre for One has previously staged its intimate works in Times Square, Brookfield Place, and Manhattan West Plaza as well as online during the pandemic.

At the Signature, the plays are written by Regina Taylor, David Henry Hwang, DeLanna Studi, Lynn Nottage, José Rivera, and Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, Rudy Ramirez, and SRĐA, and performed by Stephanie Berry, Ariel Estrada, Maddie Easley, Kareem M. Lucas, Sara Koviak, and Peter Mark Kendall.

It’s all free, but you have to sign up beginning on Tuesday for slots Thursday through Sunday, through June 26. I cannot recommend Theatre for One highly enough; it’s a profound, deeply personal gift that delivers a unique kind of connection, particularly as we emerge from the pandemic. So far I’ve seen Taylor’s Déjà Vu, in which Berry portrays a centenarian remembering the fight for voting rights, which continues today (“Time is funny,” she says. “It moves forward and sideways and bends back — over and around again — and again — and so — here we are again.”); Rivera’s Lizzy, with Koviak aching over a difficult loss and missing physical touch (“And at the moment when words would really be helpful, because the silence felt like a worse disease than the disease itself — at that moment, when her eyes wouldn’t focus anymore and I’m there to say good-bye, I didn’t know, or even remember, how to speak her name.”), and Hunter’s poignant Brick, a multigenerational tale about pride in being gay told by Kendall (“This monologue exists for a reason, and that reason is because even though I died believing that men don’t talk about their problems, I did end up saying one thing. The last time I saw Sam.”).

After leaving the Signature, I took a bus and two subways and headed downtown to Campos Community Garden on the Lower East Side to see a specially distilled version of George Frideric Handel’s 1733 baroque opera-poem, Orlando: Hero of Love, performed amid the trees, bushes, and plants on a small stage. Presented by Opera Praktikos in conjunction with Opera Essentia and NY OperaFest, the seventy-five-minute production is a charming delight, with bass Hans Tashjian as Zoroastro, countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum as Orlando, soprano Heather Hill as Angelica, mezzo soprano Hai-Ting Chinn as Medoro, and scene-stealing soprano Elyse Anne Kakacek as Dorinda, who occasionally meandered through the crowd, offering flowers to the audience.

While the show continued, garden members tended to their plants, and birds joined in the music, which was performed by harpsichordist Rebecca Pechefsky and a baroque string quartet (Rebecca Nelson, Rafa Prendergast, Jessica Park, and Cullen O’Neil).

Orlando is about the battle between love and glory, as was my next show, in its own unique way. I was initially planning on leaving the garden early and hurrying back home to watch the livestream of Circle Jerk, but I had to stay to the end of the opera because I was enjoying it so much. Thus, I checked out the 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist on my phone, listening with earbuds. It is easily one of the strangest productions I’ve ever seen, continuing online (pay-what-you-can $5-$50) and in person at the Connelly Theater ($39-$79), which is not far from Campos, through June 26.

Circle Jerk is being presented both in person at the Connelly Theater and live online (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Written by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and directed by Rory Pelsue and originally presented online only during the pandemic, Circle Jerk is a fast and furious gay mashup of sci-fi, social satire, and futuristic fantasy, starring Breslin, Foley, and Cat Rodríguez, each portraying three characters in three locations: a suburban living room, a basement laboratory, and the internet. Foley is the blue-haired Troll who serves as narrator, white gay male homeowner and Enemy of the Sheeple Jurgen, and white gay male ingenue and aspiring actor Patrick; Breslin is white gay male Meme Machine inventor Lord Baby Bussy, white gay male aspiring curator Michael, and loyal white gay male housekeeper Honney; and Rodríguez is AI gurl and devil priestess Eva María, female activist warrior Kokomo, and bodiless, ageless algorithmic “woman” Alexia. (And oh, wait till you see her eyelashes.)

“I come from the sewers of your cities and your minds / Making gospel from conspiracy and truth from lies. / So let me tell a tale of a story of a plot / Where humans learn the power and contagion of a thought,” the Troll says, introducing us to Gayman Island, the “gayest place in the nation.”

As we took the bus to Murray Hill and sat outside for a terrific dinner at our favorite local Turkish restaurant, Sophra Grill (coincidentally, our trip to Mongolia included a lengthy layover at the Istanbul airport), I was bombarded by a barrage of wild and crazy images, wacky costumes, and purposeful overacting, not from the many passersby, either on their way out or coming home after a long day, but from the show as Breslin and Foley reimagine the fate of the world. Jurgen warns, “First they came for the comedians, and I did not speak out — because I was not a comedian. At the time. Then they came for the straight male cis-genders, and I did not speak out — because I was not straight and there is only one gender. Then they came for the white women, and I did not speak out — because I agreed. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me because the Lord Baby Bussy was blackout. And now I’m blocked out on ALL the platforms except that one that Chinese babies invented.”

Circle Jerk uses social media tropes and memes to comment on contemporary society (photo by Emilio Madrid)

For more than two hours with two intermissions, the characters use multiple cameras and social media platforms (LookBook, Twitter, TikTok) to take on big tech, white supremacy, gay incels, smartphones, data surveillance, conspiracy theories, victim shaming, colonization, racial justice, Broadway and Hollywood, and cancel culture at a breathless pace, tongues either in cheek, in chic, or in other cheeky places. They throw way too much into the boiling cauldron and pound their points home with a sledgehammer, but they do so with a wickedly ribald sense of humor and self-awareness. Occasional shots of the full stage at the Connelly give you an idea of how they’re pulling it off.

“We built you to build a world where white gays run free and reign supreme,” Jurgen tells Eva María. “Your purpose is to cancel . . . the straights. Or convince them to cancel themselves. Get them either out of the closet or out of Mannahatta. And if they resist . . . well, there’s, how do you call it, historical precedent: If they refuse to convert, kill them.”

After two weeks in Mongolia — where there’s no discussion of cancel culture but colonization is part of the land’s long history — I got my New York groove back, having had quite a day in Mannahatta, highlighted by three completely different theatrical experiences that cost a total of five bucks. There’s no place like home.