The Great Recession, Chapter 1: Is This A Stroke?

I had just been kicked out of The Flea and was standing outside in the cold, at night, in the rain, next to a uniquely New York pile of garbage, thinking: How did I become the pariah in this story?

To make things more hysterical, my left eye-lid began fluttering uncontrollably, the whole left side of my face felt as if it was melting off like a scene from “The Terminator” – was I having a stroke? — and the person who had kicked me out had the title of the Flea Theater’s audience development manager: I suppose I was not the audience she had in mind to develop.
It was at this moment that I think I finally began to feel the full force of The Great Recession.
**
Unexpected Drop in Jobless Rate Sparks Optimism (Associated Press)
Broader Jobless Rate Declines to 17.2% (Wall Street Journal)
**

Things seemed almost optimistic about a month earlier, at least for me, as I sat in a cramped sub-basement office of the building The Flea occupies in Tribeca, learning how it was that the Off-Off Broadway theater had come up with the idea of an evening of theater entitled “The Great Recession.”
“We were curious how the recession was affecting young adults,” said Carol Ostrow, whose title is The Flea’s producing director. “You see on the news how people are losing their homes, but most young people don’t have homes to lose; they’re sharing a place with three roommates.”

They commissioned plays on the subject from a half dozen of New York’s most admired young playwrights, all of whom they had worked with before.

What Adam Rapp and Itamar Moses and the four others came up with, in plays of a variety of styles but none longer than 20 minutes, were tales of lives upended, ambitions thwarted, relationships ruined, people turned desperate and insane. Also, conspiracies unearthed.

I had been drawn to this show, which is opening December 10th, as soon as I had heard about it. My first reaction had been: Finally. Two years of tough times seemed to exist only in my life and on the news, not on stage or screen. Where is our Grapes of Wrath? Who is our Clifford Odets with his Awake and Sing and Waiting For Lefty? Why, as we worry about making ends meet, have we been given only newly revived old musicals with hundred-dollar ticket prices whose “relevance to our times” seems mostly their publicists’ spin? Are we, like Mia Farrow’s Depression-era character in Purple Rose of Cairo, wanting only to be stroked — to escape into the glamorous world of entertainment — rather than stirred?

Or does the absence of recession-related productions have less to do with market forces or audience demand than with the needs of art, or at least the preferences of artists? Itamar Moses has a reasonable explanation: Art takes time. “It really annoyed me when people were like, ‘Why aren’t our playwrights responding to 9/11?’” Moses told me. “As though it was an assignment we were all supposed to begin working on the morning of the 12th.” Whatever the trauma, he said, writing about it too soon produces “one-sided screeds, which aren’t really art at all.”

It is worth noting here that The Flea is best-known for its production — starting in December, 2001 — of “The Guys”, a two-character play about 9/11 that initially starred Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver, who is the wife of The Flea’s artistic director, Jim Simpson.

The new recession-related plays commissioned by the Flea, Moses said, have “screed-like elements” because everybody “is still pretty angry.” But their brevity allows for a “small lens approach” and “you’ve got six different lenses. And so the evening as a whole has a scope and perspective that no one artist, this close to the inciting incident itself, could possibly yet have.”

As I sat in the Flea offices, though, I had a second thought about the idea: Why plays about the recession’s effect just on young people?

There was a practical reason for The Flea’s choice. Its resident company of more than 40 performers, called The Bats, is comprised almost entirely of young adults. They were selected from hundreds of people who auditioned; none of them are paid. “We call them The Bats because they arrive at night, and they’re flying blind,” joked Ostrow, who seems in charge of naming things: Their theater is called the Flea, she explained, because “we’re tiny and we like to get under your skin.”

Artistic director Jim Simpson walked in just then and told of an ironic development. One of the Bats had called him up and said that he had lost his day job and was afraid of becoming homeless, and so he was going to have to drop out of the play in which he had been cast.

How much, I wondered, did the roles the Bats were playing correspond to what was actually happening to them or to people they know? The grueling images of them on the stage seemed almost in hilarious contrast to their fresh-faced head shots.

“Everybody is ducking and cowering, hoping it won’t hit them,” Simpson was saying. “I don’t think the economic uncertainty is going away.”
* *

Next: “The Great Recession, Chapter 11: Too Young To Be Bankrupt?“

Follow New York Theater on Twitter

Photographs are scenes from Sheila Callaghan’s “Recess” and the same actors’ head shots.
From top: Stephen Stout; Heidi Niedermeyer; Brett Aresco, Jessy Hodges, Laurel Holland, Jessica Pohly