Lost in a Waking Dream in ‘Behind the City’ (The NoPro Review)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
June 18, 2018
•
9 min read

Third Rail Projects takes us out onto the streets of lower Manhattan in an unforgettable alternate reality experience

(The following is based upon a press preview of the production.)

New York City. She’s a harsh mistress—one that’s as gorgeous as she is demanding. She’ll lift you up for a brief moment, and seconds later, bring you back down to Earth. Life in the city is like a machine running on psychic energy. The city’s glittering lights powered by time, money, blood, and tears.

She’ll challenge your patience, time after time. Like with the endless line at the coffee stand near your office, which happens to be a tiny window for one person, sandwiched between two skyscrapers. Or the crowd of muttering folks waiting for the next Brooklyn-bound “R” during rush hour, because the “R” in R train actually stands for “rarely.” Or the little old ladies who’ll mow you down with their shopping carts at the grocery store without batting an eye. Or maybe it’s how you can’t ever seem to catch the bartender’s attention during the last ten minutes of happy hour.

Still, it’s not a bad way to live. You know exactly who your next door neighbors root for because you hear their screams whenever their team scores during a big game. And two seats seem to magically open up at the counter whenever you pop into your favorite restaurant after the dinner rush. And you’re the first to pull out your smartphone and help out a group of tourists who’ve wandered off the grid downtown. And whenever you see a film production on the street, even if you’re running late to a meeting, you still slow down and crane your neck to get a glimpse of whichever star might be hanging around, because, well, you never know. And if you ever leave the city for a few days, upon returning you find yourself breathing a deep sigh of relief as you peer through the scratched-up window of an plane, waiting to see the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, both standing tall as the plane descends.

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” — John Updike

You might think you love the city. You might think you know the city pretty well. Well, maybe just parts of Brooklyn. Or maybe most of Manhattan, like up to a certain point around 125th Street. But no, you don’t really know all there is to know about New York City because she is always moving, always changing. Block by block, intersection by intersection.

She doesn’t stand still. She can’t.

You see, there used to be a chapel over there, on Varick, between Beach and Laight. This park we’re standing in right now didn’t exist back then. They bulldozed St. John’s Chapel in 1918 to make way for the new IRT subway line on 7th Avenue. And this fire station, over there, it used to be twice as wide. But when they needed to expand Varick Street in 1913, they sliced it in half!

Can you believe it? Isn’t that wild? They just cut the firehouse straight down the middle.

Why? Because: it’s New York City.

(Multiple, heavy spoilers follow.)

I had never stopped to think about Hook and Ladder Company Number 8, or St. John’s Chapel or Varick Street at all.

Not until last weekend. That’s when I lost my husband.

We were in the basement, in a satellite office of the Trans-Temporal Messaging Service, better known as TTMS. And by “office,” I mean… a refrigerator. But it wasn’t as cold as it should have been.

I was summoned away by a woman in a yellow dress, wearing yellow lipstick, yellow nail polish, and yellow cat eye glasses. I left him there, in the room full of yellow. It smelled like lemons.

I didn’t know when I’d see him again. He went missing. Or I went missing. Both, I suppose, are true from a certain point of view.

A tall woman in an elegant cocktail dress guided me and a stranger to an elevator and disappeared; but when the elevator doors opened, I did a double-take. The doppelgänger of the woman who had just wished us farewell was waiting inside. We entered the elevator, were transported up to ground level, and made our way towards the exit.

The doppelgänger wished us good luck and closed the doors. We stood on the sidewalk, dumbfounded.

A tour guide appeared out of nowhere.

“Follow me,” she said. Her hair was frizzy and she was dressed in bright purple and teal. She talked like a New Yorker. She held a stack of maps of the city. One of the maps had a bird on it.

Together, we ducked down quiet alleyways and peeked into secret museums. We spoke of the buildings on Canal Street and Broadway and their histories. She was the one who told us about St. John’s Chapel and Varick Street and Hook and Ladder Company Number 8 and the Holland Tunnel.

On a street corner, we ran into her friend. We received our fortunes. Mine read: A dream is a message you send to yourself. He handed me a cup of tea.

The tour guide gave us a letter and a bag of french fries to be delivered to a man wearing a bowler hat. He lived inside of a paper lantern. We opened the letter, but its contents made no sense. The writer gave walking directions which were physically impossible. There’s the basement, and the firehouse, and the chapel, but then what? Huh. We furrowed our brows and studied a map of the neighborhood together in the dim red light.

The man in the bowler hat told us he’d received an identical letter, every day, and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Who was the writer and who was writer searching for? The envelope read “TTMS.”

It feels like we’re in a dream. But were we in his dream or was he in our dream?

“That’s it! I need to take you to the window,” he said.

He took us back to the sidewalk and handed us each a set of headphones and a Walkman. I smiled, holding it gingerly. We walked a few blocks, then stopped on the street to watch a scene unfold between a man and a woman. They danced inside a brightly-lit, upper-story window on Broadway, performing for the world below. We gazed up into the darkness as music played in our ears. Nearby, bystanders gawked and took photographs on their cell phones.

A woman walked past and dropped something; it was a book, I think, but I’m not sure. At that very moment, the man on the cassette described a woman with a green purse who would drop something in front of us. It happened just as he said.

Get Kathryn Yu’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

Is this is real? I wondered. How is this happening? She wandered off into the warm Manhattan night. I looked around, wondering who else might show up next, and what the signs meant. Anything and anyone could be part of TTMS.

Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, time began to fold in on itself. I left a voicemail for myself on a flip phone and later, found my message coming back to me. I started to recognize the same sequence of numbers occurring in surprising places—a suite number, a keycode, on a TTMS ad. I kept seeing the same silhouette of a bird everywhere. I pulled a tab off of a flyer in a hallway, but the phone number was missing the last two digits.

Look again: they’re all like that.

So was I in someone else’s dream? Was the man on the cassette tape actually me? And how did he know what I knew? Didn’t I give this identical letter to someone else earlier?

I didn’t know where we were or when we were, just that I should keep following the voice in the headphones.

We weren’t lost, we were looking for someone.

The man on the cassette described a dream where he was looking for someone. And his dream always began in the basement.

We ran into a man who showed us a stack of postcards all coming from TTMS. They contained messages from his future self: some maddeningly vague, some very specific. He’d been getting a different postcard every day.

“Invest in Google in 2001.”

“There’s going to be a big storm in 2012.”

“The Cubs will win the World Series in 2016.”

“Don’t let that stranger buy you a drink.”

“Make sure your friends vote on November 8, 2016.” (“Ouch,” I said. Too soon, perhaps.)

And finally, a missed connection:

“You might be able to find him still. Go to this hotel. He’s probably going to walk through the side entrance at….”

But the postcard with the instructions was missing a corner. There was a time visible, but the date had been torn off in transit. The man with the stack of postcards held close his small digital clock and a paper calendar with every single day marked off. Long rows of precise red X’s. This month, and the last month, and the month before that.

He had been going to the hotel every single day, waiting by the same door. Every night.

I don’t know if he ever found who he was looking for.

He might still be in the hotel lobby, waiting right now.

And maybe the person he is waiting for has already walked past him. What if he doesn’t even know?

That’s New York City for you.

So you might think you love New York City. You might think you know New York City.

But no, you don’t love the city the way that Third Rail Projects loves the city: its nooks and crannies, its portals into memory, the past and the present and the future all jumbled together. Behind the City embraces the magic of it all: chaos and destiny, heartaches and half-remembered dreams. The piece blurs the lines between fiction and reality in a way that feels completely natural; it’s the culmination of all of Third Rail Projects’ site-specific and experiential work over the years. (I’ve often wondered what would happen if my favorite indie theatre companies could get access to more time and resources. I think I’ve found my answer in Behind the City, which is being presented in partnership with The Macallan.)

The production itself seems improbable, with its cast of 17 performers and multiple scenes in different rooms, spread out over half a dozen buildings. I imagine an unseen army of stage managers, supporting an audience of two people at a time with an arsenal of maps, flip phones, dot matrix printers, 23-cent stamps, cassette tapes, fortune cookies, boomboxes, and more. And spending two hours with a stranger walking the streets of Tribeca and Chinatown with headphones on is a high-risk gamble which pays off. Somehow the puzzle pieces all fit together in a stunning feat of logistics.

Behind the City finds this ground-breaking company at the top of its game. It’s beautiful, surprising, charming, absurd, ambitious, and melancholic, all at the same time. This is sheer wonder wrought large, with all of New York City as its backdrop. I sense Behind the City will haunt me for years to come. It haunts me already. I started following Third Rail Projects in 2012, but this might be my favorite piece they have ever done. Hell, Behind the City might even be my favorite piece of immersive theatre. Period.

And if you’re wondering if I ever found my husband again… I did.

Or, instead, he found me, standing on a street corner, waiting. Because the voice in the headphones told him exactly where to go.

He was looking for someone.

And it took a while, but he found them again.

Behind the City presented by The Macallan runs June 22–24 and June 29 — July 1; tickets are sold out, but a waitlist is available. Our fingers are crossed so very hard for an extension.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by: