A Thousand Ways – Part 2: An Encounter Written/Directed by 600 Highwaymen Public Theatre June 14, 2021 Production website 💉💉💉 out of 5
Now the action of Part 1 shifts gears sharply. Now this next $15 dollar ticket gets you to the actual THEATRE and gets you sitting directly across from an actual person. Still an audience is lacking but at least we are getting a live event! That’s big! There were about a dozen or so waiting in the lobby and one by one the usher would lead into one of the many theatre spaces of the Public Theatre where we would find ourself on-stage (not in the audience) and facing a simple, well lit table, 2 chairs, one social distancing screen, a stack of typed cards, a pencil, a blank card, and a tape dispenser. Rather spooky to be sitting there all alone. Eventually another person from the lobby that you do know know at all is led into your space and sits in the opposite chair.
A Thousand Ways – Part 1: A Phone Call Written/Directed by 600 Highwaymen Public Theatre June 13, 2021 Production website 💉💉 out of 5
Let me begin by saying that this really isn’t theatre in that it lacks one essential ingredient – an audience. This makes Thousand Ways an experience and not technically theatre. But at this point in theatre’s resurgence, I’ll take ANYTHING! The premise is interesting: everything happens with a phone call to a total stranger that remains a stranger throughout. Once your $15 dollar ticket is purchased, you are given a day, a time and a code to dial. When that time comes and you enter the code an pre-recorded electronic voice patches you through to another random person. From there the most mechanical voice asks you to share things with your partner ranging from serious to silly and to do all kinds of imagined fantasies as to what this person must look like and what their habits might be.
It seems like forever that I remember two ushers talking to each other after a matinee performance of The Minutes and one of them mentioning that a third usher was not going to be able to come to work that evening because she had a strange and very strong virus. Little did I know that that evening’s performance was going to be cancelled and so was all of theatre around the world going to be cancelled for the 459 days. It was a VERY rare snow day that could close Broadway – it seemed like it could survive anything but no – – this virus was a different matter entirely. But now things are slowly beginning to loosen up. Theatres are beginning to announce their seasons – most of which will launch in September and October of this year. I cannot wait. I built much of my retirement plans around the idea that I would be skipping off to NYC frequently, stay at my pied-Ã -terre, and watch theatre with abandon.
