I saw Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and The Dream of Wild Ponies Dancing

Never Done: I saw Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and The Dream of Wild Ponies Dancing

It's a great day when I can see performance created by friends. It's an even greater day when I can see two. And it's a fascinating day when one of them is on Broadway and one of them is in a little outdoor garden space in the East Village, and both of them are ultimately quite meaningful.

Because I'm not a reviewer, and I decided at the beginning of the year not to review my friends' work in this blog, I'm not going to write about content of either performance. Instead, I'm going to write about what ultimately was most meaningful to me -- environment. After seeing Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, the friend I went with said that she thought it would have had a greater impact if it wasn't on Broadway -- if it was in a theater about the size of the New York Theater Workshop, for example, which is a wonderful, high-quality small theater. While we both acknowledged that the play would lose its astounding production design in a smaller house, I ended up feeling that the audience could have connected better to both the play -- and actually to itself as an audience -- in a different kind of theatrical environment. Because you never really forget that that's Robin Williams, do you? And even if you do, then you don't -- because the audience claps for him when he enters the stage, and when he exits, and sometimes, randomly, in the middle of a scene in the middle of the play. And when the lights come up during intermission, you are most definitely in a Broadway house, with liquor for sale in the lobby -- not a non-profit theater which might have decided to design the lobby -- or even intermission performance -- to keep the audience engaged with the play.

I should add -- I love Broadway shows. I love the ornate houses, and I love being swept away, far from New York, into the imaginary worlds created on their stages. And you know what else I love? Going to a garden in the East Village that presents music, film, theater, and other performance in, around and through the foliage of the garden itself, where I went later with a different friend to see Quito Ziegler and friends' Department of Transformation. A completely different performative experience -- one in which there was a premium on the audience's ability to connect with the performance and with itself. One where we tucked into little corners together, and shared a watermelon, and watched Super 8 film projected onto a building's wall. One in which the lines between party and performance were blurred -- as were the lines between community and community building. I ended up feeling that the environment for this performance was a work of art in and of itself, and I'm not sure if I would have understood this as strongly had I not just come from the Richard Rogers just a few hours earlier.