“META-PUZZLES,” LIKEthe doozy David
Kwong reveals at the end of “Inside the
Box,” are those that arise, ghostlike, from
the corpse of ordinary ones. You may recog-
nize the concept from Lewis Carroll’s acros-
tic poems for Alice, in which the first letter
of each line spells out her name, or even
from the Hebrew bible. Making things
knotty, then knottier, and finally unknotting
them, is an innate human urge, designed to
delight but also to train the mind. Every-
thing in life, after all, is a puzzle that needs
solving.
Theater is one way we prepare for those
life puzzles; drama and comedy force you to
walk (or trip) through the moral questions
of existence. Another form of preparation, I
learned during a lifetime spent deciphering
and later creating crosswords, is the kind
Kwong demonstrates in his 90-minute show
from the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles,
livestreaming through Jan. 3. Retelling
stories of the great enigmatologists, he not
only argues for the value of gamesmanship,
especially during a pandemic that keeps us
isolated and needful of distraction, but
turns the audience, arrayed in a crossword-
like Zoom grid, into a virtual game board.
Except for one quick trick with a Rubik’s
Cube, “Inside the Box” doesn’t offer much
in the way of magic, which is what Kwong is
best known for. (Viewers of the ABC series
“Deception,” a crime drama he helped
produce about a magician, have seen some
of his illusions in action.) It’s also not espe-
cially theatrical, as there are no characters
or story beyond what’s necessary to set up
the seven games viewers are asked to play,
involving Spoonerisms, homophones, ana-
grams and the like. Eventually, though, the
way these elements coalesce into the final
meta-puzzle provides a rush of pleasure
reminiscent of a good closing number in a
musical.
While waiting for that to happen, you may
notice something else worthwhile going on.
Sitting in its Zoom boxes, the audience of 24
individuals or households becomes a com-
munity, however temporarily. As each game
proceeds, Kwong — the 25th — solicits solu-
tions from volunteers who have raised their
hands. (Yes, this is a Zoom show in which
you are asked to keep your cameras on andyour mics open.) Sometimes he’ll ask the
entire group, or segments of it, to work to-
gether, as in Voice Boxes, a game requiring
five people to recite one word each until the
words blur into a phrase. In truth, it didn’t
work so well when I saw it.
Nor was it the only dud. Several seg-
ments seemed merely mild. I didn’t think
the Knight’s Tour — a classic spatial chal-
lenge adapted for the 5-by-5 “chessboard”
of Zoom — was worth its complicated setup.
Die-hard puzzlers would probably find
some of the other games too easy, at least by
their fifth iteration. Especially unpromising
was the hidden-word puzzle included in the
preshow package that audiences are asked
to download, print and solve ahead of time.
That puzzle, though, initiates a theme
that Kwong keeps developing and varying.
“Human beings are at their most creative
when constrained,” he says, expressing theshow’s structure but also its emotional
thrust. Emotion is usually a stranger in
such contexts; Kwong is too enthusiastic
and wholesome (he calls himself an “olio of
nerdiness”) to risk turning his beloved
games into downers.
But the history of the form, he notes, is
connected to loneliness and loss; the first
New York Times crossword appeared two
months after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
having been found too frivolous before it. Or
as The Times’s founding crossword editor,
Margaret Farrar, explained, “You can’t
think of your troubles when solving a puz-
zle.”
Xylyl and rebecs and other olio-like ob-
scurities aside, games admit anyone; a
great pleasure of “Inside the Box” is the
sight of families, including young children,
participating. I may not be the perfect audi-
ence for it, longtime addict that I am. Still,
anything that spreads the good word is fine
by me. And that’s what Kwong’s show (like
his previous one, “The Enigmatist”) does
best.
Permit me, though, one last cavil. Re-
warding (or rewording) puzzles should not
require more effort in the explanation than
they do in the solving. Every loose string of
“Inside the Box” is pulled together in its fi-
nal moments, but not without strain. So be
it, I guess; even Stephen Sondheim made
puzzles you sometimes didn’t know how
you solved even after you solved them.
Ever try his three-dimensional dodecahe-
dron cryptic?
Nitpick over; a good meta-puzzle not
only makes me happy, it makes me look for
the larger scheme, the larger truth, the
larger joke in everything. There are even
meta-reviews, if you know where to find
them.IMAGES VIA GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE“Inside the Box,” by the magician and puzzle creator David Kwong, top, turns the Zoom audience into a virtual game board.
Rewarding (and Rewording)
David Kwong offers games
built for Zoom that let the
audience be part of the puzzle.
Inside the Box
Through Jan. 3; geffenplayhouse.orgJESSE GREEN THEATER REVIEWC2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020
A FEW YEARS AGO,I clicked on an
article claiming that the average
human spends 20 minutes on hold
per week, or approximately 13
hours per year. Consider me
above average. Because last
weekend I spent an hour and a
half clambering through nearly
every branch of an existential
phone tree. Is it weird to say I en-
joyed it?
“Human Resources,” an aural
experiment created by the Tele-
phonic Literary Union and
produced by the Woolly Mam-
moth Theater Company, uses the
form of an automated phone sys-
tem to speak to themes of alone-
ness and disorientation many of
us feel. So in its way does “KlaxAl-
terian Sequester,” an immersive
audio work that tries to make you
feel better about pandemic life by
positing an even grimmer alter-
nate reality. These are pieces
about trying and most likely fail-
ing — no matter how many signal
bars your phone shows — to con-
nect.
While quarantine has given a
boost to audio drama generally,
these are among the few pieces
that speak directly to us listeners
and allow for our responses. The
creators of both experiences have
thought about what motivates us
(lonesomeness, boredom) to put
on our headphones and hit play.
Or, in the case of “Human Re-
sources” and the 14 calls I ulti-
mately made, redial. That phone
tree kept kicking me off. I’m try-
ing not to take it personally.
Written by Brittany K. Allen,
Christopher Chen, Hansol Jung
and Zeniba Now, “Human Re-
sources” just wants to make you
happy. Or at least direct you to an
appropriate customer service
representative. It begins with an
automated greeting, a robotic
voice commanding you to listen
carefully as the menu options
have recently changed. Here’s the
menu: Press “1” to file a claim for
unhappiness; “2” gives you the
Department of Conscious Re-
arrangement; “3” directs your
call to technical support; “4”
routes you to an actual human be-
ing (allegedly); “5” is a company
directory that leads to outgoing
voice mail messages for the cre-
ators and cast. Because I have a
stubborn completist streak, I lis-
tened to them all.
Most options lead to other op-
tions, a mobile maze of forking
paths — some infuriating, some
surreal, some poignant, several
merely dull. Listen long enough
and you can find aural gems
nestled amid the thank-you-for-
your-patience recordings. If you
are an Off Broadway superfan,
there’s also the fun of recognizing
many of the voices. Is that Mia
Katigbak? It is!
Still, it takes discipline to listen
to “Human Resources.” Those 13
hours a year have trained most of
us to tune out hold music and auto-
mated assurances as we wait for a
sentient operator to come on the
line.
I never could reach another hu-
man, despite the main menu’s
promise, which gave “Human Re-
sources” a melancholy and some-
times fractious feel, a buildup to a
payoff that R.S.V.P.s and doesn’t
show. (Think “Waiting for Godot,”
with Muzak.) But there are com-pensations, like the actor Jin Ha
reading Wendell Berry’s “The
Peace of Wild Things.” Even the
robot voice offers comfort. As I
waited to file my unhappiness
claim (subcategory: loneliness),
the robot sympathized. “We are
sorry to hear you are unhappy,” it
said. And then, “This can’t be help-
ing.”
Or maybe it can? Almost all of
us are on hold right now, in one
way or another. And the thought of
so many people, all navigating an
unnavigable moment, pressing
buttons and entering codes in
hopes of support is a funny kind of
consolation.
There’s also the chilly reassur-
ance of knowing that as bad as
things are, they could be much,
much worse. “KlaxAlterian Se-
quester,” a play for your smart-
phone by Ben Beckley and Asa
Wember, imagines a future in
which alien life-forms arrive on
Earth sometime later this year
and promptly enslave humanity.
For reasons the extremely fuzzy
premise can’t explain, you, a hu-
man, have been sent back from
2083 to 2020, when the KlaxAlteri-
ans made first contact, to listen in
on their early communications.
“We can only break their hold
on us if they understand who they
think we are,” your bearded liai-
son (Beckley) will tell you in a pre-recorded video sequence.
The hourlong piece, which you
are asked to perform alone in your
home, has you look through alien
eyes (assuming aliens have eyes)
at what it is to be human. After the
video, an audio sequence asks you
to take an inventory of the human
body. The inventory sounds a lot
like a thesaurus run wild. “Rostral
orifices at the anterior center of its
neck orb”? Those would be your
ears. “Gelatinous spheroids en-
veloped in folds of skin”? Your
windows to the soul. Subsequent
audio files then move you from
bedroom to bathroom to kitchen
and back, exploring alimentation,
purgation and other mundane as-
pects of the day-to-day.
The piece ends in an irritating
indeterminacy, and it’s doubtful
that these audio tracks would help
aliens understand humanity, or
the inverse. Will the six minutes I
spent considering the mechanics
of my bathroom free us from our
alien shackles? Unlikely. As in
“Human Resources,” connection
falters.
But “KlaxAlterian Sequester”
stands on firmer and more hu-
mane ground when it makes the
familiar strange, asking us to
think deeply about what we often
take for granted — the facts of the
human body and its lived envi-
ronment. I didn’t think that after
this many months indoors my tiny
apartment could ever seem for-
eign. Yet for that hour it did. Even
the simple act of sipping a glass of
water felt weird and charged.
There’s a bit more to “KlaxAlte-
rian Sequester” — interstitial
sound files to listen to as you move
from room to room. Those se-
quences suggest something aw-
fully bleak. In this dark future
world, humanity barely survives.
But hold music is still going
strong.Human Resources
Through Nov. 1;
woollymammoth.net
KlaxAlterian Sequester
Available online at klaxalteria.comALEXIS SOLOSKI CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKAn Aural Cure
For Loneliness
Two immersive audio
works are about efforts
to connect with others.The garment maker Sky Cubacub, the danc-
er Jerron Herman and the filmmaker and
sound designer Jim LeBrecht are among
the winners of the Disability Futures initia-
tive, a new fellowship established by the
Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation to support disabled artists.
After a yearlong research study in con-
versation with disabled people, the initia-
tive has named 20 artists, filmmakers and
journalists in its first class of fellows, each of
whom will receive a grant of $50,000 admin-
istered by the arts funding group United
States Artists. The 18-month initiative not
only pledges financial support, but also
aims to foster a creative community across
mediums and generations.
Margaret Morton, the director of creativ-
ity and free expression at the Ford Founda-
tion, said that the idea came from a desire to
engage more deeply with disabled people,
in addition to funding organizations that
they lead. But the first step was to make
sure the needs and experiences of disabled
artists were heard and met in a thoughtful
and collaborative way.
“I realized I needed to learn much more,
we needed to learn much more as a team,
about language and about how to engage,”
Ms. Morton said in a phone interview.
To do that, the Ford Foundation reached
out to Deana Haggag, the president and
chief executive of United States Artists, to
work as a consultant and lead a small team
in a year of research. Upon its completion,
Ford approached the Mellon Foundation to
jointly establish the fellowship.
“I remember the team, they were asking
for feedback early on, and I mean this has
been a year process even before they sent
out the invitations,” said Mr. Herman, one of
this year’s recipients, who dances with the
company Kinetic Light in addition to work-
ing on solo projects. “Even that in and of it-
self is a change of focus and prioritization, of
getting it right.”
That feedback helped to create a grant
program specifically targeted to the needs
of the individual artists, from an accessible
application process to flexible compensa-
tion options for the grant money.
“The idea that, ‘Oh, well, we’re just going
to give you a $50,000 award and you should
be so happy,’ well, that’s not so easy,” Ms.
Morton said. “There are so many compli-
cated issues for them around medical costs
and federal benefits that complicate their
taking monetary support up to a certain
amount.”
Because some federal health benefits aretied to a person’s earned income, the grant
money can be distributed in one lump sum,
in payments or even be deferred, depend-
ing on what works best for the artist. Addi-
tionally, the money can be tailored to each
winner’s needs, whether to help pay for the
art itself or support the artist.
For the painter and author of “Golem
Girl,” Riva Lehrer, another of this year’s fel-
lows, that meant the possibility of more am-
bitious projects and new studio space. For
Sky Cubacub, the money helped to keep
their clothing line, Rebirth Garments, oper-ational through a global pandemic.
“I was able to use the money from the fel-
lowship to pivot to mask making,” the de-
signer said, including face coverings specif-
ically designed for people across the dis-
ability spectrum. They added that they
were also able to hire additional full-time
employees, which will allow Cubacub to
take some time to focus on their mental
health.
But more than just offering monetary
support, the fellowship is also focused on
fostering community among its winners
and elevating their work collectively, with a
public gathering tentatively scheduled for
July.
“I’m more excited about the community
and the cohort and the collaboration that we
can have for each other,” Jim LeBrecht, a
fellow and one of the directors of the docu-
mentary “Crip Camp,” said in a Zoom call
from his home in Northern California.
Artists can bring “thoughts and pleasure
and meaning” directly to our homes, Mr. Le-
Brecht said, adding that a fellowship of this
size, focus and prestige affirms that “dis-
abled artists can do the same thing, and it’s
not just for the benefit of them, but it’s for
the benefit of society in general.”
To read more about this year’s recipients
and their work, go to fordfoundation.org
/disability-future-fellows.Foundations Unveil Initiative for Disabled Artists
Recipients will get $50,000
each from Disability Futures.
The designer Sky Cubacub, one
of the recipients of the 2020
Disability Futures fellowship.GRACE DUVALBy LAUREN MESSMAN