C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020decadence of Parisian life.
Yes, I am talking “Voulez-vous coucher... ” and all that jazz, including visits from
the green fairy. Following a violinist
(Maryia Vasileuskaya) and a guide with a
windup music box (Katherine Winter) —
both wearing Christopher Metzger’s delec-
table throwback costumes — we are led
down busy streets, through Washington
Square Park and finally indoors, to the top
floor of Judson Memorial Church for a se-
WHAT DOES A BROKEN STORYlook like?
Since March the pandemic has fractured
our narratives like a stone thrown at a glass
vase. But two eclectic site-specific shows —
the fanciful “Voyeur: The Windows of
Toulouse-Lautrec” and the ruminative
“Electric Feeling Maybe” — embrace the
fragmentation, even confusion, that Covid
has brought us, with hit or miss results.
Let’s begin with the miss. On a lifeless
street of warehouses in Sunset Park, about
a dozen metal folding chairs sat, spaced at
least six feet apart, in front of a yellow ga-
rage door. The door rose on a small stage
with blue velvet curtains, and a gaggle of ac-
tors entered and exited, offering stumbling,
incomplete reflections on touch, fear and
loss. So Target Margin Theater’s “Electric
Feeling Maybe” is a show about — wait, let
me stop right there, because, as one actor
says early on, “It’s a showing, not a show.”
Cute semantics aside, the 30-minute
show(ing), created collaboratively by the
Target Margin team and presented outside
the Doxsee, their regular home, is a series
of broken reveries, fuzzy reminiscences and
interrupted interactions. There’s no narra-
tive, just the actors — who play themselves
— moving to and fro, trading off their some-
times lyrical meditations.
Brief moments do stand out from the
ramble: thoughts on Aeneas’s loss of his
wife during the sack of Troy in “The Ae-
neid,” and stunning snippets of poetry, as
when one cast member says, “When I shake
a person’s hand I feel as though a tiny part
of myself is commandeered by their touch.”
“Electric Feeling Maybe” is the culminat-
ing event in a set of pop-up storefront per-
formances throughout Sunset Park, all un-
der the title “Magic in Plain Sight.” (The one
I saw involved neon pink rope lights, music
and miming.)
But the entire production feels like a pro-
logue, hindered by self-consciousness. Tar-
get Margin doesn’t need to follow the basics
of Playwriting 101, but it does need, in the
words of Hamlet’s mother, a bit more matter
and less art.
The opposite could be said of Bated
Breath Theater Company’s “Voyeur: The
Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec,” an immer-
sive walking-tour performance through the
West Village inspired by the company’s
site-specific production “Unmaking
Toulouse-Lautrec,” which ran inside a bar
for many months starting last summer.
“Voyeur,” conceived and directed by
Mara Lieberman, begins on the sidewalk
across the street from a different club, the
Duplex, where lovely ladies of the night,
dolled up in yellow and pink, dance and pose
in the French windows. We’re meant to
think of the Moulin Rouge, home to the re-
nowned French artist Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, the hedonistic painter and illustra-
tor who captured the sensual pleasures andries of performances linked by the theme of
voyeurism and, ostensibly, the life of
Toulouse-Lautrec.
The artist himself appears, albeit in pup-
pet form (beautifully crafted by James Or-
tiz). There are some biographical tidbits,
and here and there “Voyeur” touches on the
exploitation of women’s bodies, but the pro-
duction is more concerned with creating im-
pressionistic dreamlike tableaus than expli-
cating a coherent narrative.Young versions of Toulouse-Lautrec’s
parents (Marin Orlosky and Ethan
Pravetz) dance with a light-up picture
frame down West Eighth Street, and a wom-
an (an unforgettable Natasha Frater) puts
on a seductive performance in a storefront
window, just to slump and stare vacantly
when it’s all over. (The choreography is by
Leila Mire and Kelsey Rondeau, with Nate
Carter.)
Everywhere there are frames and can-
vases, miming and mirroring and silhou-
ettes, with particularly poetic set designs
by Sadra Tehrani and Ebony Burton. The
result is a performance that tells a story
about empathy and connection — without
relying on a traditional story at all. Instead,
piece by piece, we are forced to transcend
our gaze and realize the humanity of the
subjects of our vision.
What ended up intriguing me most about
both shows was circumstantial — the vari-
ables that came with where they were per-
formed. Target Margin’s production felt ut-
terly local, like a collaboration with its Sun-
set Park community, small distractions and
zooming cars and all.
Gathering in a busier part of New York,
the audience at “Voyeur” became part of
the spectacle; a shadow performance hap-
pening in the tented dress bottom of a
roughly eight-foot-tall woman with a light-
up parasol drew a crowd taking pictures
and video. At the end, everyone applauded
and most moved on, while a few continued
to follow us.
Skaters, musicians and chess players by
the Washington Arch stopped and stared as
we passed, holding our plastic candles and
following an imposing lamplighter in a
bowler hat. A yogurt shop employee craned
over the counter and through the store win-
dow to see it all better.
The hubbub brought distractions, not to
mention safety concerns, as we picked up
random hangers-on along the way. (Those
of us in the “official” audience had our tem-
peratures checked and provided informa-
tion for possible contact tracing.)
I now suspect there are two kinds of New
Yorkers: Ones who will, without any con-
text, follow a curious group of performers
through the city, and ones who will not.
I am usually the latter. But these two pro-
ductions helped me understand the impulse
to stop and let yourself get drawn in by a
scene on the street — whether on a corner
in the West Village or a garage in Sunset
Park. Right now we face a stutter in our
stories; our lives are interrupted. Why
wouldn’t we want to step out into our city
and collect all the tales we can?MAYA PHILLIPS CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKHUNTER CANNINGNeighborhoods
Set the Stage
For Decadence
And Loss
AUNDRE LARROW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESClockwise from top: Natasha
Frater, left, and Ashley Burton
in “Voyeur: The Windows of
Toulouse-Lautrec”; Allison
Lian (top window), Kayla Yee
(lower right window) and Leila
Mire in “Voyeur”; Will Badgett
performs a monologue in
“Electric Feeling Maybe,” part
of a series of pop-up storefront
performances under the title
“Magic in Plain Sight”; and
Sarah King and Frank N. Poon
in another “Magic in Plain
Sight” event.
AUNDRE LARROW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES HUNTER CANNINGPerformers share meditations in Sunset Park, and bring
a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris to the West Village.Electric Feeling Maybe
Through Friday at Target
Margin Theater, 232 52nd St.,
Brooklyn; targetmargin.org
Voyeur: The Windows of
Toulouse-Lautrec
Through Nov. 22 at The Duplex,
61 Christopher St., Manhattan;
unmakinglautrecplay.com
.