The Tenant was named one of the ten best things on stage in 2011 by our old swimming buddies at the The L Magazine. They called us ‘shoestring, site-specific, geniuses,’ which made us blush.

In addition we were mentioned as part of one of the top theater stories of the year at Playbill, and they reminded everyone to watch this again, because it’s awesome.

Capering impishly between campy B-horror and a deadly serious revisionist Sunday-school lesson, Robert Askins’s daffily devout black comedy is just the sort of juicy little morsel the hard-bitten theatervore hopes to find, and seldom does, Off Broadway.

Read more at New York Magazine, The New York Times, & TheaterMania.

The New York Times boasted:

Mac Wellman’s “3 2’s; or AFAR” offers the playwright’s typically dizzying and fluid unfurling of language. References, registers and nonsense rhymes fly with madcap precision…everything in “3 2’s; or AFAR” eludes, and deliciously so.

Read more at The New York Times.

Alexis Soloski at The Village Voice reported:

His theater seems to defy rational description. It requires that you be present–breathing, watching, and most of all listening–in the performance space as Wellman’s words surround you. Being and time are what he demands of you–and the rewards are ample.

Read more at The Village Voice.

Additional reviews at New York Theatre Review, nytheatre.com.

Asuncion, the new play written by and starring Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg, has extended three weeks at off-Broadway’s Cherry Lane Theatre. The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production will now close on December 18 instead of November 27 as previously announced.

Directed by Kip Fagan, the play also stars The Hangover’s Justin Bartha.

Read more at Broadway.com, Playbill.com, and BroadwayWorld.com.

City dwellers know how many personal dramas can overlap when people are thrown together. The social friction can be a pleasure—or it can make you crazy. The Tenant, a new site-specific performance piece by the adventurous Woodshed Collective, unfurls this reality like a great theatrical tapestry of vintage grit. The action sprawls across five floors of a derelict church and parish house. Spectators wander through at their own pace, exploring spaces as minute as a closet and as broad as a darkened sanctuary. At each stop (and sometimes in between), we encounter fresh data—spotting a new character, overhearing a bit of revealing dialogue—and can only speculate on which parts of this enigma might fit together.

Ultimately, The Tenant is a triumph of simultaneity and atmosphere over narrative satisfaction. It’s a memorable evening, thanks in large part to the extraordinary production design by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn.

The acting is by and large very strong, especially in long, intimate scenes like a drunken game of “canard, canard, goose” in Trelkovsky’s apartment, the Zys’ fight over a mummified talisman, or the off-air banter between two radio play performers. There are wordless moments of great visual power too, as when roughly half the cast begins pacing the halls dressed like the deceased former tenant in blonde wig and red dress, or when the silhouetted man across the square stares insistently into Trelkovsky’s room. Whatever fragments of the various stories one comes away with, The Tenant‘s success can be gauged by the extent of its immersion. After two hours one feels less like a spectator and more like an inhabitant of a beautifully dilapidated old building whose tenants are all different degrees of crazy.

The Tenant has much to recommend: Especially for a show presented free of charge, it is impressively ambitious, inventive and creative.

The show’s dreamlike mood of sinister paranoia is so palpable and persuasive that it almost doesn’t matter if the story loses you. The world they’ve created is a fascinating one to get lost in.

Carl Faber’s marvelous lighting design creates an atmosphere of creepy anxiety, and it soon becomes clear that this is less an apartment building and more an insane asylum.

It’s inevitable that Woodshed Collective’s The Tenant, a site-specific theatrical interpretation of Roland Topor’s novella via Roman Polanski’s film adaptation, will be compared with the downtown hit, Sleep No More. Both require audience members to freely walk through several floors of rooms, exploring the contents and running into actors playing out scenes. But despite its less elaborate production values, I found The Tenant to be a far superior and much more entertaining experience.

The Tenant is a tightly woven ninety minute psychological thriller, played in the compact environs of West-Park Presbyterian Church, where 23 actors are continually tempting spectators to travel from one intriguing scenario to another.

Co-directed by Teddy Bergman and Stephen Brackett, the terse dialogue of the moody evening is played with delicious aloofness, even when audience members are standing inches away from the actors. Music by Duncan Sheik and David van Tieghem, as well as sound design by Brandon Wolcott, subtly adds to the tension and designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn provides the wonderfully dingy settings for the dilapidated residence.