(Michael Schulman’s article appeared in The New Yorker, 5/27; via Pam Green.)
We go to the theatre for communal experiences, whether with an audience of a thousand or of ninety-nine. But what if it were just you? The aptly named company (entity? singularity?) Theatre for One has reduced play-going to its least populated imaginable form: one actor, one spectator. For starters, that means no competing with other audience members over armrests.
Playwrights on the order of Lynn Nottage, Will Eno, and Craig Lucas have contributed five-minute plays to the project, which goes by the collective title “I’m Not the Stranger You Think I Am.” The venue, created with the design studio LOT-EK, is a mobile four-by-eight-foot black booth that looks as if it were made of road cases. Between May 27th and 31st, it will be at Zuccotti Park, the erstwhile home of Occupy Wall Street, and then at the Grace Building plaza from June 2nd to 6th. Last week, it set up shop in the glass-covered Winter Garden at Brookfield Place—not to be confused with Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, which specializes in Theatre for One Thousand Five Hundred and Twenty-Six.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/close-encounters-of-the-theatrical-kind