"Play is the highest form of research," attributed to Albert Einstein
INTRODUCTION.
Under normal circumstances, I would never paint a design on a stranger’s face, much less let her paint one on mine. I would never play charades. Do pantomime. Dance with abandon, sober, during the day. Singly; with someone else; or together with an entire room of strangers. I would never fill in sentence blanks on walls. Paint something based on a wall prompt. Ask someone to perform a healing ceremony based on an instruction put into a balloon pulled down from the ceiling. Sidewind across the floor like a snake, also based on an instruction put into a balloon pulled down from the ceiling. I would never play piano in public. Contribute percussion to a spontaneous effusion of music. Under normal circumstances, I would never go 90 minutes without speaking and yet feel, later, that it was one of the most intense, satisfying, and social 90 minutes of existence since who knows when. Unless, of course, I was a 7-year-old at a birthday party. That’s what PLAY is. Anything but normal, a perpetual birthday party.
The experience is immersive, immediate, and impeccable. We wear black clothes. It makes us blank slates, like blackboards, open to anything. The impact of silence? No misunderstandings, no verbal labyrinths. No hesitations, no pre-thinking, no negative self-fulfilled prophecies. The only wall flowers are the ones we paint on the wall. Each particular audience completes each particular show. The same way that viewers complete to fruition the daubs of paint that constitute an Impressionist painting. No media, no distractions – old school fun. Literally, fun and games before radio, before TV, before the Internet. A minimum of needs. No AC/DC, no Wi-Fi, just imagination, curiosity, and a desire for experience and the knowledge that comes from play.
Typically, there’s a tacit acknowledgement that a director enacts a playwright’s work through the actors for the benefit of an audience. PLAY, a collective group that makes over a downtown warehouse into an amusatorium, turns that acknowledgement on its head. The audience is the cast, the directors (aka, the conjurors) are more playground monitors than directors, and the script is a series of minimal prompts that blossom organically, depending on the inclinations and experiences of each audience iteration. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.
There’s an hourglass on top of the piano. Grains of sand mingle down in no particular order to join other grains of sand. Just like us. Perhaps, probably, more a way to manage the passage of real world time (otherwise we’d be there all afternoon), it nonetheless offers a fitting metaphor for the experience. I couldn’t not look at it the whole time. It made me think of a vertical Cheshire Cat grin. It made me think about time past. It made me nostalgic for being a kid. The 90 minutes just flew by, as time did during during summer break. Anything the world could serve up was an occasion for fun, exploration, and experimentation. As we yet had no context of the world and of our place in it, we had no preconceptions. And without preconceptions, who’s to say we couldn’t bust a move like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction? Play air guitar like Pete Townsend of The Who? Interact with people, simply, sincerely, face-to-face like Marcel Marceau, Charlie Chaplin, and Harpo Marx?
Afterwards, you’re spent. Physically (Playing. Is. Hard. Work) and emotionally (Playing. Is. Intense). Driving home you smile and muse, Life isn’t a cabaret, old chum, it’s a recess.
WHAT'S IT ABOUT? The rediscovery of PLAY as you gambol upon a PLAYground constructed at the DMZ of LA’s Skid Row.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? We need to reclaim something. Just ask Pablo Neruda. “I bent my head into the deepest waves, dropped down through sulfurous calm and went back, as if blind, to the jasmine of the exhausted human spring.”
WHO SHOULD SEE IT? Everyone, anyone. Honestly, though, seven-year-olds would wonder, What’s the big deal?
WHAT SHOULD I FOCUS ON?
- How you shed half-baked ideas and unreflected-upon experiences.
- How you transition from self-conscious trepidation and fear to unconscious excitement and bewonderment.
- How Things. Just. Happen. Before fear burbles up and stymies expression.
- How you approach and then open up to strangers with nothing but a smile.
- How you activate an internal process of: listen->respond-intuit->interact->immerse->rejoice->repeat.
- How you notice not just physical silence but mental silence, as well. No more voices that prejudge and predetermine imagined outcomes.
- The Spotify PLAYlist by Kyle Kaminsky. It’s suggested you listen to it to get in the mood. Great advice! Try this, too: Linus and Lucy, by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
THE VERDICT? Want an epiphany? See this show. Scurry, though. It only plays for one more week.
HOW DO I VISIT? Performances are 7:00 - 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 – 11:00 p.m., Friday and Saturday; and 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 - 5 p.m., Sunday. The show runs until Sunday, April 15. Tickets are $50 for 1, $90 for two. The location is one block from the Grand Central Market; it’s precise location will be revealed upon ticket purchase. For more information, visit here.
... NOTE, YET MORE: The show's been extended yet again.
Each Saturday in May and June, 9:30 p.m.
... NOTE, MORE: The show's been extended for an additional two weeks. These performances include:
Friday April 27 - 9:30 PM
Saturday April 28 - 7:00 PM
... NOTE: The show's been extended for two more weeks. Additional performances include:
Friday April 20 - 7 PM
Saturday April 21 - 9:30 PM
Friday April 27 - 9:30 PM
Photos courtesy of Lorelei Nelson