Blurred Lines (Theater Edition)

"See...my...vest!"

This past Saturday, I caught the theatrical equivalent of a double feature: seeing two plays in one day. With a Shake Shack break in-between. And the more I thought about it, the more I realize these two plays shared a very common (and I do admit, slightly arbitrary for the sake of this post), thread: they cross boundaries.

I started my day by waking up at noon, having cereal, and then heading into Manhattan for "Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play" by Anne Washburn at Playwrights Horizons. It deals with a post-apocalyptic world, where immediately after, a group of people act out old episodes of "The Simpsons" from their memories to keep themselves entertained.

And with "The Simpsons" becoming oral history, in the style of "Othello," it becomes something like a Greek drama in the second act (set 75 years after the apocalypse). It's a powerful concept: At the end of the world, after the power goes out, "The Simpsons," a work originally presented in the most philistine of mediums: sitcom television, have become the new classics: a Grecian-style tragedy with chorus, masks, and overtones of morality.

Low art has become high art. Or maybe it has always been high art and it just took the lights going out to realize it.

2012 in Theatre Superlatives

"What good thing have you seen lately?"

That's the question I'm usually asked when I tell people that I write about theater (for a living, wow). It's as if because I report on it, I am suddenly the guru of good theatrical tastes. And since year-end lists and summations are "a la mode" during this time in the season, I want to offer something in the stream-of-consciousness vein. I'm realizing that the more theater I see, the more they start to blend together. And what makes a play stand out in your memory, even months later, were small moments that just burrowed deep into your brain and refused to let go.

So here is the 2012 Deep (Diep) Theater Superlatives!, a list of shows that were memorable in many different ways to me. It's not a complete list of the best things I saw this year, it's even more subjective than that. These plays, at different price points, in different locales in New York City, did what the arts does best, grab a piece of your soul and leave their mark on it.