I just got home from seeing MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES. Yes, that’s really the title of this play. My friend Emily invited me to see it and she tends to pick interesting theater, so I happily followed her to the theater.
Here Theater is just around the corner from City Winery, so we started the evening with dinner there.
The show itself is difficult to describe. The NY Times review says:
In the wake of the grim news about the bankrupt auto giants, commentators have been bemoaning the decline of American manufacturing. Please don’t share this sad news with the three crackpot inventors in the gloriously demented new show “Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines,” at Here Arts Center. As the obsessive-compulsive title clearly suggests, these guys are intense, seriously nerdy and highly sensitive fellows. The idea that the world’s last superpower has lost the knack for gizmo making might send them into a colossal funk.
And the program notes say, the production company, rainpan 43, is “dedicated to creating innovative, actor-driven absurdist plays that are at once deeply profound and utterly ridiculous.” In that, they have utterly succeeded with MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES. The set, a collection of contraptions and Rube Goldberg machines, is as much a character as any of the actors. I really don’t know how they could have rehearsed without it.
