Armory “Enemy of the People” - REMAINING PERFORMANCES CANCELLED

Wonder how "big" this show will be? It's a huge space. The last few things i saw there I loved because of their grand scale, so I can't imagine a one-woman show in that space.

Still plenty of dates available as I write this. I guess I'm not very good at predicting what will sell out quickly and what won't lol

I like Icke too. Expect an intelligent reading of a classic play in contemporary dress with contemporary allusions. I did find Icke's ORESTEIA to be a bit of de-mythologizing bore. Also not a fan of The Armory as a playing space for intimate acting. I always think that many of the shows that I saw there would have worked much better at the Harvey Theater at BAM.

Damn - $28 for rush? That's the cheapest ticket I've ever heard of the Armory selling in the 3 years or so that I've been seeing shows there. Now I'm a bit bummed that I paid like $60+ (with fees) and went through the trouble of roping in a +1

Oh well, at least I have the peace-of-mind. Still excited to see the show!

I'm also a bit worried about the venue, but Icke is a smart director. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Also, knowing his past work, I assume there will be some live video feed component to the show, possibly making it easier for the faraway audience members.

ardiem said: "I’m sitting in the venue now. All the tables have seating for 5, so maybe that’s how they were able to squeeze in the rush seats. There are probably 30 tables total. The staging is such that I don’t think anyone will have trouble seeing. There are also two large billboards on opposite sides of the venue that will likely be used for projections. Each table also has a small monitor."



Thanks for the report! Glad to hear that.

Kind of annoying that they would go through the trouble of making people buy in pairs, only to seat you with other pods. But again: oh well.

I'm not a great reviewer, so apologies for my fragmented thoughts here...

I came into it being completely unfamiliar with the original work. I felt the play was less about being invested in the characters and more about them being a vehicle for you to reflect on your own moral code. The play was interspersed with some seamlessly-integrated opportunities to "vote" on the direction of the play, but it was a per-table thing rather than individual thing. The concept didn't quite work for me - you're given a minute to discuss amongst your table a binary choice, and maybe I'm being too neurotic about it, but they involve some weighty issues that aren't amenable to snap judgments and the whole process just kind of runs counter to the careful and methodical consideration that the characters themselves deem important. It was also unclear if the votes actually registered - there wasn't any feedback that I noticed when pressing the buttons. Voting qualms aside, the story and the questions it raised resonated with me. I do think it could have done a better job of staying in a moral gray area consistently - there were moments where it lost its nuance and characters veered into caricature.

I thought the performance was fine. If it weren't a solo show, I'd imagine the runtime could be cut by a third, as much of the dialog was descriptive. There was a lot essentially naming who was speaking, as it wasn't particularly clear from the performance itself. The narrative/descriptive lines weren't as... poetic?... as The Lehman Trilogy, which I naturally reach to as a point of comparison since I saw it at the Armory and everyone played multiple characters. The large video screens employed a technique where the camera angle would change when she flipped characters, which helped slightly.

The size of the space always manages to awe and overwhelm me in a way that masks other shortcomings. The set could be visualized as a large, raised X with the audience seated at tables in between the legs of the X. I think no matter where you were, you'd have a decent view of the action, but at the same time, there wasn't much to see. There were no set pieces, save for a map in the center that was mainly used to accent transitions (and only seen through the live video projections).

Overall, I'd say I had an enjoyable, but not memorable evening. I would've been fine paying full price for a ticket.

Though I’m not a fan of the original play (in practice more than in theory, as it is a fascinating plot), I found this to be a thought-provoking evening that still needs some time to settle and coalesce.

Ann Dowd was excellent, I thought, as her ability to tell this story alone is, more often than not, quite captivating. Yes, she is using teleprompters and sometimes it shows, but this is over an hour and a half of text that’s shifting every night, so I can’t blame her. But because there is nothing to focus on but her, and particularly her voice, where the show begins to flag, she hasn’t quite settled yet into a solid rhythm.

There are clever uses of the billboard projection screens to indicate which character she’s speaking as when there’s more than one speaking at a time, but I get the sense that the lighting and camera cues could use a few more performances to learn Dowd’s groove to make them clearer. Overall though, and maybe this is just because I so desperately missed the theatre, I wish Robert Icke had inflected the production with just a touch more theatricality to keep the blood pumping. Despite being anything but subtle (Dowd’s Professor Joan in particular is a bit of a raving lunatic), it rarely feels like more than a live, true crime podcast you get to vote on with strangers. It’s a fantastic concept, but I can’t help but feel slightly short-changed for how glorious the Armory space is.

What the show DOES have to offer is the conversation it sparks. My husband and I were at a table of 4 with one other couple, and we were consistently in happy but firm disagreement on each vote. With only a minute to discuss and 10 seconds to press the button to lock in your answer, it becomes a stressful game of who has a better argument. Almost all of our choices came down to “rock, paper, scissors.” The whole story has some pretty pointed, completely non-explicit commentary on how we arrived at the state we did with COVID-19 (and Flint, Michigan, and and and); a late comment about the town sign saying “Drive carefully!” when arriving, but not when leaving, struck a chord.

If nothing else, this is a great reason to have someone with you, to continue the conversation after and congregate with strangers again. I forgot how much I missed striking up a conversation with the person sitting next to me for the short time we’re stuck together. And when you add in the voting element, where every choice is black or white, you start to see how you align or don’t align with them morally in the face of some pretty serious issues. Strongly recommend it if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet.

Updated On: 6/27/21 at 07:54 AM