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Emma Goode in “Moving Dave”
I hadn’t been to New York City in almost six years. This was partially due to its often unbearable superiority complex and my perversely stubborn Baltimore pride, but it was mostly because of lack of funds and a good reason. I still lacked (or I should say, lack) funds, but I was finally given a good reason: old friends from college were getting married. Wanting to make the most of my long-awaited return to the Big Apple, I started looking for something cool to do the day after the wedding, hangover or sleep deprivation or both be damned. This type of research is hard, particularly in advance and from afar, because “cool” is usually deeply uncool. Getting desperate, I checked the Mets’s schedule (I’m an Orioles fan) and even looked at Broadway shows (“When in Rome…”), but New York’s team was out of town and nothing spoke to me among the surplus of infantilizing jukebox musicals and movie adaptations. What happened to Broadway? I muttered to myself.
But luck came my way a week or so before the wedding. I was on Instagram mindlessly swiping through stories when I saw something about a play by microbudget filmmaker Kit Zauhar being staged off-off-broadway as part of a night of one-acts written by screenwriters. I am a fan of Zauhar’s work, and I actually read her play on MUBI Notebook when she published the script in conjunction with the digital release of her second feature film, This Closeness (2023). The play had apparently been based on two relationships Zauhar was developing for a novel, but she reworked them for a staged reading (featuring her and This Closeness costars Ian Edlund and Zane Pais) when Good Evening Rep, an artist-run reading series in NYC, invited her to perform something she’d been working on.
In her introduction to the script on MUBI Notebook, Zauhar essentially set her script free, requiring no royalties for future iterations: “Here’s my invitation—if you felt excited, seen, or challenged by reading this—to put on your own version and share the final result with me.” I remembered seeing something months prior, again on Instagram, about a staged reading in Los Angeles—“the L.A. Premiere”—but to my knowledge, this night of one-acts was the first full production of her play. It was accompanied by plays from April Consalo and Theodore Collatos; collectively, the show was titled Other People’s Lives.
Katrin Nugent and April Consalo in “Good to You”
I looked into Adult Film, the Brooklyn-based theatre company putting this whole thing on, and stumbled upon a bona fide manifesto in the “About” section of their website:
WE ARE WORKING CLASS. WE BELIEVE IN WORK THAT IS DEEPLY, UNABASHEDLY, AMERICAN. BY THAT, WE MEAN WORK THAT IS SINGULAR, INDIVIDUATED, AND FULL OF SIZE. WORK THAT IS UNAFRAID OF FAILURE, THAT RISKS EVERYTHING IN ORDER TO GET TO SOMETHING TRUE, SOMETHING REAL. WORK THAT IS LIVED IN, SWEATY, AND SENSUAL. WORK THAT IS MATURE, AND MESSY, AND CUTTING. WE BELIEVE IN ARTISTS WHO ARE WILLING TO PUT THEMSELVES ON THE LINE. ARTISTS WHO CAN AND WILL REVEAL THE WORST AND BEST PARTS OF THEMSELVES IN EQUAL MEASURE, WHO ARE INTERESTED IN QUESTIONS, NOT ANSWERS. WHO AREN’T AFRAID OF BEING “UNFINISHED.” WE ARE CREATING A HOME FOR LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE TO SHARE IDEAS, TO TRAIN, AND TO PERFORM. OUR CLASSES ARE AFFORDABLE, OUR TICKET PRICES ARE CHEAP, AND OUR DOORS OPEN TO ALL WHO WANT TO JOIN US. THE WORKING CLASS ONCE HAD A SEAT AT THE GRAND TABLE OF AMERICAN THEATRE AND CINEMA, AND IT’S TIME TO TAKE THAT SEAT BACK.
Hell yeah. I’m a sucker for a good manifesto. This was either going to be epic or the most pretentious shit ever, but there was only one way to find out. Coincidentally, the show’s closing night was April 27, the very day I was looking to fill. I had seen enough: I texted Alex Lei, my good friend, longtime roommate, and fellow film person [Editor’s Note: and BRUISER editor], and asked if he wanted to go. He responded with exactly the reciprocal enthusiasm I was looking for: “DUUUDE lfg.”
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The wedding was a whirlwind as my past collided with social anxiety and alcohol (I did shots for the first time in years). I felt more like a fly-on-the-wall observer than a partygoer raging to the “vibe,” but it was an honor to have been invited, and by the end of the night, none of this even mattered: I was surrounded by my favorite people, and my cynical heart, if briefly, believed in love. The night blurred into the next day, and before I knew it, Alex and I were rushing to the theatre venue, located at the very farthest reaches of Bushwick. When the L Train surfaced above ground, I had forgotten it was still daytime. I looked out the window and saw the late-day sun beating down on a massive cemetery. Is this still New York City? As we neared the address, the sidewalks slowly crumbled and became nothing. The venue turned out to be an unmarked warehouse (excluding the graffiti), and, initially, we couldn’t find where we were supposed to enter. Once we did, we made our way down a skinny hallway, turned a corner, and entered Unit J, a DIY performance space that doubles as an artist loft (when I used the bathroom it became clear that people lived there). We grabbed some drinks that were being sold in the adjoining kitchen and took our seats.
There was a remarkable degree of intimacy and casualness to everything. Shop lights provided the lighting. Musical instruments were stacked in the corner. Shelves with vinyls and movie posters lined the walls. There was no program. Even the actors were mulling about beforehand, socializing and helping seat people, making the traditionalist in me question how serious this was going to be. There were only about thirty total seats, and later, when they needed a few more, someone grabbed the drum stool and the others watched from the second floor, accessed by a metal spiral staircase. After a quick introduction from one of the actors, black curtains were pulled to separate the kitchen from the performance space, turning it into a makeshift backstage area. The lights dimmed, and we were off.
Stephee Bonifacio and Austin Cassel in “You Made Me Feel”
The first one-act was Zauhar’s “You Made Me Feel” (dir. Michelle Moriarty), which consisted of two conversations between a woman (Stephee Bonifacio) and two different men from her past: her counselor (Austin Cassel) from arts camp with whom she had a sexual encounter at age 16, and a man (Matt Street) with whom she just cheated on her boyfriend. The play opened on the woman scrolling through her camera roll while she waited at a bar. In the first multimedia element of the night, her phone screen was wirelessly projected onto the wall behind her, immediately bringing visual flair to Zauhar’s script and foregrounding the play as a woman’s reexamination of her own past. The two conversations revealed information slowly and deliberately, making it a game to figure out the exact nature of the respective relationships—and why they were juxtaposed. The woman was interrogating and trying to understand her complex feelings, but the men were no help, constantly belittling her in sly ways and weaponizing the murkiness of the past to absolve themselves of wrongdoing.
“You Made Me Feel” was the most rigid production on the bill, both in terms of structure and staging. A diptych, the two conversations mirrored and played off each other in interesting ways. At one point in the second scene, the man told the woman, “I’m guessing you really haven’t gotten hurt. Like, actually hurt. People who have been hurt don’t talk like that…. Like, I know people who have had really fucked up things happen to them. People taking advantage of their naïvety, their desires, or, like, their sadness masked as desire, it’s not good. It changes them. It breaks them.” But based on the first scene, we know that this exact thing happened to her with the camp counselor. Bonifacio’s acting here was stellar as she got emotional thinking about her past trauma but opted to withhold the truth; she even turned away from Street so he couldn’t see her reaction.
This is where the rigidity of the staging came into play. Because the entire one-act took place at a single table, the emphasis was on the subtleties of the performances and the nuances of the script. Seeing the actors work in this restrained setting made the moments they decided to initiate contact all the more charged. Even a slight lean in or lean away, as evidenced above, became momentous. In lesser hands, this “touchy” subject matter would result in something preachy, pandering, or predictable, but Zauhar’s script shined as a puzzle of meaning. The woman often contradicted herself, and with every line the audience was challenged to figure out if she was doing this deliberately or simply because she is human.
Katrin Nugent and April Consalo in “Good to You”
In the blackout, an entire section of the audience was relocated, turning the thrust stage into a theatre-in-the-round. Next up was April Consalo’s “Good to You” (dir. Gia Bonello), which opened with another technically impressive use of multimedia: The music transitioned from the house speakers to the phone of Nico (Katrin Nugent), who had just entered. The music was then abruptly cut off by a phone call from Del (April Consalo), Nico’s former bandmate and lover, who was in town on tour and looking for a place to crash. Del arrived drunk, and the two proceeded to hash out their complicated history in an attempt to reconcile their vastly different realities: Del was a rock star in her early twenties, living the dream but still unfulfilled, and Nico was a barista in their early thirties who, despite being the superior songwriter, seemed relatively at peace with their less “successful” life—that is until the past came barging through the door. Of course, the commentary on “making it” was inseparable from their past romance, which they discussed, debated, and briefly reignited. Like Zauhar, Consalo created characters who were forced to reckon with an intense desire that had persisted from a problematic and messy relationship. But Nico and Del quickly learned that acting on this type of desire isn’t all fun and games: It required them to confront the age gap, power dynamics, and ethics of consent that made their relationship problematic in the first place.
Foreshadowed by the shift in the seating arrangement during the set change, “Good to You” disrupted the established order and added chaos to the night. When Del first arrived, Nico struggled to maintain the harmony of their home, constantly moving things that Del put in the wrong place. Needless to say, Nico eventually succumbed to Del’s chaotic energy, and the play got physical: One moment they were wrestling on the ground, the next they were having sex on the couch. This physicality added a sense of immediacy and danger to the proceedings. At one point Del tackled Nico mere feet from where I was sitting, and for a split second I was scared that Nugent was going to hit their head on the ground. They didn’t, but they did let out such a heavy breath that Consalo’s hair blew in its wind. I have never seen theatre like this.
Good to You also expanded the “stage.” The venue’s bathroom came into play, a gin bottle prop was secretly stashed among the vinyls, and at one point, Nico grabbed a guitar from the corner of musical instruments (audience members had to move out of the way so Nugent could get it) and proceeded to play and sing a song that left the audience stunned. (Because Del was blocked from my view by Nico during this scene, my eyes wandered to the crowd on the opposite side, and I was struck by a woman whose jaw was on the floor, in complete awe.) It was immersive and emotional and felt spontaneous; a few minutes prior, I would never have thought that the guitar was part of the play’s diegesis.
Consalo was pitch-perfect with her own script, but Nugent was a standout, flawlessly vacillating between coldness, aggression, playfulness, passion, and a weed-induced panic attack all within the span of minutes. In perhaps the moment of the night, while Del was in the bathroom, Nico sat on the couch and began masturbating. Nugent looked up, and as the shop lights reflected off tears in their eyes, they conveyed love, sadness, desire, regret, jealousy, shame, and a hundred other emotions all at once—with no words. It was the most privileged of “privileged moments,” one whose power is impossible to fully capture or describe. As with all great theatre, you just had to be there.
But Consalo the playwright had another thing up her sleeve, cashing in beautifully on a few lines of dialogue from earlier where Del questioned if Nico was alone in the apartment: At the very end of the play, in walked Nico’s girlfriend (Stephee Bonifacio) from the bedroom. In an absolute gut punch, she revealed that she was underage, just like Del was when she was with Nico, reframing Nico’s behavior and making us all reconsider how much empathy we had been extending them.
Rich Carrillo in “Moving Dave”
The show’s increasing entropy was again amplified during the blackout as punk music blared and the actors threw empty beer cans all over the set. What followed was “Moving Dave,” written and directed by Theodore Collatos. The play began with Teddy (Matt Street) returning to his apartment after three months away to find that his roommate Dave (Rich Carrillo) had trashed the place, paid no rent, allowed two strangers (Ari Dalbert and Myles Brewer) to move in, and brought a strung-out woman (Emma Goode) home from the park. Like Nico in the previous play, Teddy initially tried to restore order, but it proved impossible, so he banded together with his new roommates to try and kick Dave out. On top of all this, he was desperately trying to find a shoebox of rare football cards that his father gave him—he suspected Dave stole them while he was gone.
Coming out of the gate, “Moving Dave” was more outwardly funny than the previous two works, leaning on “bro humor” and slapstick. But it worked because the humorous main plot was a disguise for the more heartfelt underbelly of the story. In a stark tonal shift in the middle, Teddy asked Kristine, the woman from the park, if he could record her (he was a filmmaker), and in the best use of multimedia of the night, her image from the camera was projected onto the wall in real time. What followed was a haunting scene in which Teddy filmed Kristine talking candidly about her surveillance paranoia and drug addiction. Goode’s acting was impeccable, ethereal yet deeply human, catapulting her to the most compelling and sympathetic character on stage. Initially, Kristine was a side character with little dialogue who simply bore witness to the shenanigans happening around her, but she ended up being the key to the whole thing.
Despite being a narrative departure from the previous plays, Moving Dave felt right intuitively and was a perfect progression in terms of scope. The lighting became more dynamic and more rooms of the building suddenly became part of the diegesis, including the kitchen that had been curtained off earlier (revealing the lighting and sound guy on his laptop). The ensemble cast was all over the space, ramping up the chaos and thriving off it. Several times I had to move my feet while the actors ran by. Their “mistakes” didn’t matter, both because they added to the cumulative mayhem and because the actors were talented enough to adapt on the fly and remain completely in control. Tripping on the corner of the rug? No problem. Tossing a bottle of Dave’s piss at a trash bag and missing? Just roll with it. At one point, an actor coughed while smoking, causing him to stumble over his next line. But his castmate, without missing a beat, ad-libbed the perfect line to get everything back on track. I’m not sure anybody really noticed this, but that’s what made it so impressive.
And just when I thought the play couldn’t possibly throw any more curveballs, Ari Dalbert turned directly to a member of the audience and exasperatedly asked her something along the lines of, “Can you believe this is happening?” The woman, caught completely off guard, didn’t know what to do, but managed an apt reply: “No.”
At the end of the play, Kristine went to finally leave the apartment and Teddy, knowing her better than anyone else because he took the time earlier to actually talk to her, told her that she can stay as long as she needs—they’ll “figure it out.” Teddy then left the room, and Kristine, after taking an extended beat to think it over, took the shoebox of football cards out of her bag and put it on the coffee table, causing several members of the audience to gasp. She turned and left, and for a few beautiful seconds, the stage was empty, and all thirty of us in attendance were looking at a blue shoebox, contemplating everything.
Emma Goode and Matt Street in “Moving Dave”
The lights dimmed, came back up, and the show was over. After a curtain call and enthusiastic applause, the actors casually started cleaning up the empty cans, mingling with the audience, and drinking—it was closing night after all. The playlist blasting on the speakers unironically included multiple songs by The 1975, which in some warped way made me like the whole event even more. These people did not care one bit about trying to be “cool”; this was for pure love of the game. I looked around and everybody seemed to know each other, which made me suddenly feel like I was at a party I wasn’t invited to. I was ridiculously thirsty, but the water cooler was empty, so I downed a Modelo as fast as I could, and Alex and I hopped the L back to Manhattan.
We got off the subway near Times Square, passing by the theatres hosting Aladdin and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on the way back to our hotel. Seriously, what the fuck happened to Broadway? The next morning I woke up and forgot I was in New York. After a weekend of glimpses into other people’s lives, I think I was just ready to get back to mine. I forgot how much being in New York makes you miss Baltimore.
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A couple days later, I was once again swiping through Instagram stories and saw Adult Film had posted some photos from what had turned out to be an entirely sold-out run of Other People’s Lives. The photos made me nostalgic for only two days prior, when, for an hour and forty-five minutes, in an unmarked warehouse on the edge of Bushwick, it felt like anything could happen—and everything that did happen was magic. The last slide of their story was a reshare from Katrin Nugent: a photo taken from the second floor of Unit J, looking down on the entire cast in the middle of the “stage.” The caption read, “Something very special happened here.” Indeed it did, and I was honored to have been a part of it, even if I was just a fly on the wall.
