I Can’t Hear You. The Plays Are Running. ‘Play/Date,’ an Evening at a Bar About Evenings at Bars
Laura Collins-HughesJuly 23, 2014: For the urban eavesdropper, paradise is a place where it’s almost impossible not to overhear human drama unfolding: a park bench, a subway car, a quiet cafe. But in purgatory — a crowded nightclub, say — the roar of sound makes pantomime of strangers’ conversations. So, best of luck listening in on the many intimate one-acts that make up Play/Date, a clever and frustrating show that ponders connection and disconnection through the lens of bar-scene dating and technology. Conceived by Blake McCarty, directed and designed by Michael Counts and written by 17 playwrights, it’s staged on three levels of Fat Baby, a Lower East Side lounge. Mr. McCarty and Mr. Counts produced the show with Mr. Counts’s wife, Sharon, in collaboration with the theater company 3-Legged Dog. Intended as an immersive adventure, Play/Date is instead an obstacle-strewed exercise in thwarted acoustics, though that’s not entirely the fault of the sound designer, Marcelo Añez. Look at the space: hard surfaces everywhere, one level flowing airily into the next, no walls between them. Music plays throughout, a soundtrack to the din of the drinking, chatting, milling crowd that is the audience. Multiple plays are performed simultaneously, all contributing to, and some succumbing to, the sound bleed. Actors wear headset microphones, but even so, they may be inaudible from no more than a few feet away. Women’s voices, especially, tend to dissipate.
READ THE REVIEW