“These Two New Theater Works Need You to Listen”

Helen Shaw, Vulture

A short-run piece in the Ice Factory Festival, We Need Your Listening, seemed like the right piece for the moment. A small audience Zooms into the New Ohio Theatre’s virtual lobby, only to be diverted into “breakout” rooms for one-on-one interactions with actors. Despite the Zoom interface, we were actually “together” in the physical theater: The makers Ilana Khanin, Velani Dibba, Elizagrace Madrone, and Stephen Charles Smith had arranged a low-fi hi-tech meetup, in which phones, tablets, and laptops were carried around the tiny West Village theater and set up facing each other in pairs. After each short conversation, a stage manager “carried” us to a new interaction — speed-dating for devices.

The show was an experiment in de-glossing video production. How to make Zoom feel fresh again after all these months? By roughing up its surface. In facing screens at each other, like two mirrors in a mise en abyme, the team had distressed the video into something new. The feeds looked like crackly, noisy ’80s TV — which is to say, great.

“Thing’s I’ve Been Digging - August 3, 2020”

Screens of Distance

Despite the sudden proliferation of Zoom readings and similar real-time grappling with the question of how to make theater in our new time of plague and worry, this tribute to human connection and study in “radical listening” came the closest to delivering on the age-gifted new double meaning of Aretha’s late-period classic “Who’s Zoomin’ Who.”

They ushered each viewer from the digital waiting room that irritates most of us into breakout sessions – after time scanning the slightly shabby West Village space where the New Ohio recently moved (that made me extremely nostalgic). Unseen hands led us through a solo journey (represented in space by a tablet or computer) from one other computer to the next, featuring a member of the ensemble: Hilary Asare, Alex Bartner, ChiWen Chang, Sam Gonzalez, Alice Gorelick, Julia Greer, Nile Assata Harris, Annie Hoeg, Sam Im, Bri Woods.

That fantastic ensemble, for a couple minutes, interacted with me, the viewer, to a greater or lesser degree (most impressively, one woman played an abbreviated “20 Questions” with me) while muted. There are layers of discomfort in not being able to say your piece and a heavy re-figuring toward listening, absorbing what the person is staying that was difficult to adjust to (even for those of us who have exercises and think we’re better at it, this puts the lie to that – addressed to my fellow men, mostly, probably).

These snippets of conversations – some responding to the same prompt: were two different people meant to talk about the three memories they’d take to a desert island or did someone get confused on the order – are provoking in themselves, for me the character who had a family friend say, “The least we can do is show up.” at her father’s funeral, a delectation-soliloquy about favorite sounds, and a fantasia about “Doing a knife dance to Nina Simone’s ‘Take Care of Business For Me’” all hit me hard.

But these vignettes accumulate weight, like a combine, from the objects in immediate proximity. And that underlined how we all accumulate meaning and resonance from one another. The hum of other conversations that periodically came through the edges made me so lonely for other humanity I almost cried.

There’s also an interesting, rough-hewn visual poetry in the movement. The not-perfect rise and walk when we’re picked up. The blur of lights and shaky faces, the theatre lit only by that blue light that will wreck all of our sleep.

I’ve had some wonderful one-person experiences – most prominently I remember a COIL Festival show called Hotel Goethe – and I’ve seen some brilliant theater since the lockdown. But this was the closest thing I’ve seen to feeling like I’m at the theater. And I can’t thank the company enough for it.

“Best of 2020 - Theatre/ Opera/ Dance”

I was in awe of groups that created new work from tools not intended for this purpose. Magic came from relatively straightforward narrative work […] to more ephemeral work like We Need Your Listening by Velani Dibba, Ilana Khanin, Elizagrace Madrone, Stephen Charles Smith.