One of the more buzzed about happenings in the NYC indie theatre scene this summer is the conversion of a former sweater factory in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens into a new performance space.
Dubbed Modern Sweater, the first performance the space will ever see is a production of Georg Büchner’s 1836 unfinished masterpiece Woyzeck – the challenging, ur-moderist and ur-absurdist play that inspired Bertolt Brecht, and tempted the likes of Werner Herzog (who made a film) and Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett (who made the immersive The Drowned Man.)
(Ed. note: Yours truly always found Woyzeck intimidating in its incompleteness, and so only tried his hand at directing a redacted version of Büchner’s Danton’s Death in college. Büchner FTW.-Noah)
Adult Film, the experimental lab that is tackling Woyzeck, bills the show as “[a] site-specific exploration of class conflict and madness. A rock musical devising lyrics from 1830s Germany. A horror story through a humanist lens.”
Joining the company members of Adult Film will be Randall Jaynes, who served as a Blue Man and the Senior Artistic Director with Blue Man Group for over two decades.
To learn more about the production, which runs July 15-August 8, we subjected director Seth Bockley to the Coming Soon question form. Mercifully we skipped the part of the process that involves those questioned consuming nothing but peas.
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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Seth Bockley: Woyzeck is a theatrical event taking place in an old sweater factory in Ridgewood, Queens. The play’s text is an amazingly fresh, devastating, funny and strange story, a German fever dream of the 1830s. Our experience will be a relentless, 60 minute production where you find yourself unsettled, sweating, laughing, puzzling. It is immersive like a dunk tank. BANG! You’re in the water.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
SB: Woyzeck is inspired by lost summers, when the world seems dead. Summer is very sensually evocative to us as a company — I think it's perfect for the sexual, brutal nightmare that we're constructing with this play. When I was in high school I used to ride my bike in the suburbs and listen to Nick Cave’s murder ballads. And later Karen Dalton and other old sad music. It’s a bleak big feeling, to know the summer just goes on and on and there’s no saving any of us. We all suffer together. Dancing, dancing, dancing. And sweating.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
SB: Fans of immersive entertainment will find themselves in a place where no one has ever seen live art before. They will walk down an alley and into a place of work, still basically untouched since the last time it was used as a sweater factory. They will look at the walls and the old machines and feel some of the weight of history.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
SB: We are learning, alongside our remarkable designer Josh Barilla, that the space has a mind and spirit of its own. We think it’s haunted, but in a good way. We learned (spoiler!) that the large industrial fan set in the wall works when you flip the switch, that it has a squeaky belt, and that the squeaking sound of the belt is roughly an F sharp.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
SB: We recommend listening to PJ Harvey’s demos, eating a “Bomb Pop” popsicle, reading Büchner’s novella “Lenz,” and thrift-shopping a vintage bathing suit. Follow Adult Film on IG: @adultfilm.nyc
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