Victorian House Street Theater and Industrial Loft Art Dorm Parties. (Another here & there tale)
I couldn't believe how long the line was. Stretching all the way down to the end of the block and then another half a block more. I saw at least a dozen familiar faces from the neighborhood among them. The family from around the corner whose mom was on jeopardy once, I was friends with the younger son in High School, my brother with the older. There were our next door neighbors with the twin girls, 10 years old who loved it when my dad or I picked them up and played air plane, or took them to neighborhood pool for endless tossings and splashing.
The neighbors two blocks down whose father was a pastry chef and hosted the unfathomably decadent New Years Day party every January 1st, often the one time of the year I played catch-up with their daughter I went to Hebrew School with, who stood at about 4' 10", maybe 95 lbs to my 6' 5", 195.
We were all trying to look foward, maybe get someone or another to hold our spot while we walked ahead to see if they were still seating people, or if the line was moving at all. There were even astounded mentions that the line stretched on the exact same distance on the other side. There were also faces unfamiliar to the neighborhood. People who had come in by subway from Park Slope, some of them even from Brooklyn Heights, rumors abounded that some of them even came from Manhattan. Big ole' city folk coming here! To our quaint little Brooktopian 'hood!
All for a free outdoor performance of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
It was a very ambitious endeavor. An independant theater company called Brave New World Reperatory decided to use the soft, beautiful ambiance of Ditmas Park West to host a play that took place in 1930's Alabama. The lawns and porches made excellent settings for the idle chatter of young children and legal discourse of Atticus Finch. An improptu jail cell on one porch, another house completely darkened to be the home of the reclusive Boo Radley, even an old Model-T Ford strolling down the street at one point, making us feel that for just a moment, between the goose-neck orange glow of the street-lamp and the arching cover of Sycamore branches, we just might have been in a small town in Alabama.
Well, not exactly. There was the more-than 200 person audience sitting on chairs in the middle of the streets, plus the additional hundred along the sides observing what they could. (Some, such as myself could see more than others due to my height advantage) with a pair of pathways on either side of the seating to allow the actors to run back and forth across the street, addressing the many houses all used as sets and scenes for the performance.
It was a conceptual masterpiece, and for a neighborhood that has sat comfortably in it's serenity for over 150 years, it was a beaming moment of pride for us. We took the stoic composure of a neighborhood that was once a refuge for the upright protestant nativists of New York, fleeing a city rapidly being tainted with immigrants, Catholics and bohemians, a neighborhood that only about forty years ago reinvented itself a a multicultural haven for families was now recreating once again as a place for youth, art, and performance, a place that has now welcomed us all out of our comfortable porches and living rooms to the new neighborhood coffee shops and restaurants. Places to meet our new neighbors and continue to bound upward and onward
On that note, I'm sorry too report that the play was so dull.
Perhaps it was just a cultural misreading. Though the houses and lawns seemed a perfect setting to transform to a different place and time, the audience didn't seem to grip the story written by Harper Lee in 1962. It might have been a North/South thing, it might have been a then/now thing, but though the costumes were wonderful, the acting quite compitent, the story just didn't seem worth standing on the street trying to poke a head above the crowd to see. At least that's what the standing crowd thought, which thinned out more and more as the play progressed. The seated crowd seemed content.
In other news, and on the other side of town, I spent a party-night out in what will soon be my new home: The industrial lofts of East Williamsburg. And it was shocking how much it felt like I was back in college. Dorms. Enormous, fancy college-art dorms, the difference being, it wasn't a college compus, it was an industrial Brooklyn 'hood. I also didn't have to concern myself with class the next day. We went to one apartment where a funk band was strumming away, celebrating someone's birthday, and another where a DJ was spinning jungle music. Both parties had kegs, beautiful young people, and I'm presuming not a single one of them would be interested in seeing a performance of To Kill a Mockingbird on a tree-lined Victorian streetscape.
Ah, the many shades of Brooklyn.
The neighbors two blocks down whose father was a pastry chef and hosted the unfathomably decadent New Years Day party every January 1st, often the one time of the year I played catch-up with their daughter I went to Hebrew School with, who stood at about 4' 10", maybe 95 lbs to my 6' 5", 195.
We were all trying to look foward, maybe get someone or another to hold our spot while we walked ahead to see if they were still seating people, or if the line was moving at all. There were even astounded mentions that the line stretched on the exact same distance on the other side. There were also faces unfamiliar to the neighborhood. People who had come in by subway from Park Slope, some of them even from Brooklyn Heights, rumors abounded that some of them even came from Manhattan. Big ole' city folk coming here! To our quaint little Brooktopian 'hood!
All for a free outdoor performance of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
It was a very ambitious endeavor. An independant theater company called Brave New World Reperatory decided to use the soft, beautiful ambiance of Ditmas Park West to host a play that took place in 1930's Alabama. The lawns and porches made excellent settings for the idle chatter of young children and legal discourse of Atticus Finch. An improptu jail cell on one porch, another house completely darkened to be the home of the reclusive Boo Radley, even an old Model-T Ford strolling down the street at one point, making us feel that for just a moment, between the goose-neck orange glow of the street-lamp and the arching cover of Sycamore branches, we just might have been in a small town in Alabama.
Well, not exactly. There was the more-than 200 person audience sitting on chairs in the middle of the streets, plus the additional hundred along the sides observing what they could. (Some, such as myself could see more than others due to my height advantage) with a pair of pathways on either side of the seating to allow the actors to run back and forth across the street, addressing the many houses all used as sets and scenes for the performance.
It was a conceptual masterpiece, and for a neighborhood that has sat comfortably in it's serenity for over 150 years, it was a beaming moment of pride for us. We took the stoic composure of a neighborhood that was once a refuge for the upright protestant nativists of New York, fleeing a city rapidly being tainted with immigrants, Catholics and bohemians, a neighborhood that only about forty years ago reinvented itself a a multicultural haven for families was now recreating once again as a place for youth, art, and performance, a place that has now welcomed us all out of our comfortable porches and living rooms to the new neighborhood coffee shops and restaurants. Places to meet our new neighbors and continue to bound upward and onward
On that note, I'm sorry too report that the play was so dull.
Perhaps it was just a cultural misreading. Though the houses and lawns seemed a perfect setting to transform to a different place and time, the audience didn't seem to grip the story written by Harper Lee in 1962. It might have been a North/South thing, it might have been a then/now thing, but though the costumes were wonderful, the acting quite compitent, the story just didn't seem worth standing on the street trying to poke a head above the crowd to see. At least that's what the standing crowd thought, which thinned out more and more as the play progressed. The seated crowd seemed content.
In other news, and on the other side of town, I spent a party-night out in what will soon be my new home: The industrial lofts of East Williamsburg. And it was shocking how much it felt like I was back in college. Dorms. Enormous, fancy college-art dorms, the difference being, it wasn't a college compus, it was an industrial Brooklyn 'hood. I also didn't have to concern myself with class the next day. We went to one apartment where a funk band was strumming away, celebrating someone's birthday, and another where a DJ was spinning jungle music. Both parties had kegs, beautiful young people, and I'm presuming not a single one of them would be interested in seeing a performance of To Kill a Mockingbird on a tree-lined Victorian streetscape.
Ah, the many shades of Brooklyn.
posted by GideonLevy | 5:58 PM
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