(Alexis Soloski’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/18.)
James Godwin’s deliriously weird puppet show, “The Flatiron Hex,” takes place in a New York only a little different from the one we know and sporadically love: “a maze of ghosts and minor gods, floating in the middle of a toxic swamp.” A postmodern assemblage of the eerie and the icky, it follows Wylie Walker, a plumber, I.T. expert and high-level shaman, as he works to protect the city from a catastrophic storm.
At the start of the play, Mr. Godwin enters the Dixon Place stage wearing a mask like a gazelle’s skull and murmuring ominously, an almost cozy entrance compared with what comes after. The plot that unfurls somehow whirls together Mickey Spillane, H. P. Lovecraft, an AppleCare employee manual and occasional gouts of blood.