World War II may be being fought around you, but expect the occasional “sorry” to be whispered as a foot is stepped on. The structure of Seeing You is more fixed, and you are guided more deliberately through the action than the freewheeling Sleep No More, although you must still watch your feet as the characters careen around you, and your fellow attendees drift around you. The show is as much ballet and drama, and Desi Santiago’s design is stunning, just as it was with the costumes and masks he created for Savage Beauty, the Alexander McQueen exhibition that showed at the Met in New York and the V&A in London, and one of the best fashion exhibits of the last decade. We see a group of male soldiers messing around in a restroom, an unexpected sexual frisson suddenly present.
(Our answers return very directly to us at the end of the show.) Russell, anti-Japanese, wants to elicit as much ill-feeling as he can towards Grace. You can choose your own experience in the opening minutes, until the moment you are shepherded to listen to Congressman Lloyd Russell (Ted Hannan), who asks the audience a deep and framing question about the morality of war. The excellent performers-Lauren Cox, Aaron Dalla Villa, Christopher Grant, Alison Ingelstrom, Maija Knapp, Jodi McFadden, Zach McNally, Whitney Sprayberry, Jay Stuart-own whichever space they are in, happy and sad, tortured or wistful, pugnacious or scared mid-movement they may suddenly collapse, or drop their heads, as if they are having a stroke or a heart attack.
Ghostly 1940s-music wafts through the venue, and a sense of menace and dislocation-how war is an aberration in every sense-is signaled by warpings in the music. (The production could not supply a script or story breakdown, or answer my questions about various characters.) A Japanese woman, Grace (Eriko Jimbo) shouts desperately into a telephone. In the atmospheric and tantalizingly staged Seeing You, it is the eve of war in Hoboken, New Jersey, and as you walk in you can see various spotlit dramatic tableaux: an official-looking lady fussing over papers on a desk, two sets of heterosexual couples having, variously, vexed conversations (about him leaving to go and fight in the war), and a little light passion. It is the creation of Randy Weiner and choreographer Ryan Heffington Weiner is a producer of Sleep No More and the creator of Queen of the Night, which featured, as the Daily Beast’s Nina Strochlic reported in 2014, “Chinese acrobats, wild dancers, and a Bacchanalian feast.” The multi-talented Heffington choreographed Sia’s “Chandelier,” among many other inventive delights. The action takes place in a huge space on one, ground floor, level. You may find a male soldier suddenly stripped to a pair of tighty whities, crying and distressed, lurching towards you. However you feel about personal space, and how familiar you want actors and other strangers to be with you, will determine your enjoyment threshold of such theater.Īt Seeing You, which has just begun life under the High Line’s 14th Street entry and exit point in New York City’s Meatpacking District, prepare to be right in the middle of the dancing, speeches, shouting, singing, and fighting. There are many variations on “immersive theater,” running the gamut of “kind of sitting in the action and having an actor perch on your chair” ( Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812) to “Oh no, there’s a crazy witch running at me, and I was trying to follow that nurse” ( Sleep No More) to “I am definitely being inappropriately assaulted by a zombie” (various Halloween theatrics).
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