Review: WITNESS’s “Noirtown” presented by the Rave Theater Festival
Natalie Rine, Associate New York Critic
The audience files into the Teatro LaTea at The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center a few at a time, handed a piece of paper outlining simple instructions: we can choose who to follow and where to guide ourselves during the entirety of this promenade-based, immersive new play titled ominously Noirtown. This storytelling technique is not new to theatre group WITNESS, whose productions frequently give audience members the agency to choose how they want to experience a narrative while moving around a designated space.
The titillation of Noirtown springs from the titular source material, the well-beloved genre of film noir. Defined by the vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality in a post-war setting, “noir” is played up to check all of those boxes in this mesmerizing production now playing as part of the new Rave Theater Festival downtown. It is an exploration of pain, loss, memory, and the mysteries found within ourselves and the world around us.
To this day there is a debate whether “noir” is a film genre only, based on the aforementioned content, or a style of storytelling, identified by its visual attributes. Addressing this extent, I would have liked to see bolder design choices rooted in playing off of these iconic black and white films, rather than centered off a post-war vibe only, drawing predictable parallels to the popular immersive Sleep No More, albeit with equally snappy costumes and period props which should be commended, as well as superb and helpful lighting design guiding scene and tonal changes with clarity.
In Noirtown, the audience is plopped inside a world inhabited by three down-on-their-luck detectives, each linked by the same enigmatic woman. As directed by Charlotte Murray, with a cast of six, this is an amiable, alluring premise for an age drowning in self-reflection, information overload, and—let’s face it—another impending financial crisis. So a classic set-up, classic characters, and classic feel check all the right noir boxes for this hungry audience of all ages. Trouble arises for this ambitious production, however, in a not-so-classic problem for live performances these days: we can’t quite ever hear, let alone understand what the heck is going on.
Only one phrase comes to mind when thinking back on this experience: Buddhist teacher Pena Chodron writes, “Never underestimate the inclination to bolt.” As the basic premise of this immersive work, you are of course the star, able to control where and when you see events unfold around you. The other seventy people are mere props, other spectators whose actions you cannot control. But confined to the narrow hallways and miniscule back rooms of the theater, we go into survival mode, dashing and pushing around the throngs of audience members standing literally between us and catching the next plot point. It is not enough to say that you can make your own travel decisions throughout the piece; if you switch characters or linger too long deciding on if you should literally bolt after characters, you will have missed something Sleep No More understood can be a challenge for promenading audiences: dialogue. Racing to catch up with a character’s plot, let alone physically catch up to them, becomes the overwhelming obsession during the eighty minutes of Noirtown, quickly making the audience and show a sweaty, unorganized mess that distracts from any appreciation of or attempt at solving the mysteries at hand. This is by no means to underestimate the wit and humor of Michael Bontaibus’s writing (or rather, what I could catch of it), and a bigger space and smaller audience size could alleviate this gargantuan problem easily.
The basic groundwork for a piece that includes all the vulnerability and tenderness and fragility of noir and real life is there hidden amidst the chaos, and where Noirtown succeeds is in creating a parallel world, a hologram of emotions, passions, and breathtaking reversals where characters intersect and—if you’re lucky and cut to the front—are mere inches away. Noirtown in this iteration though, with its small space and too large audiences, gives you the illusion of feeling everything without quite having to be vulnerable to anything at all.
NOIRTOWN: A NEW IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
“Noirtown” is written by Michael Bontatibus and is directed by Charlotte Murray. “Noirtown” stars Nik Duggan, Daniel Harray, Shane Jensen, Kendall Kemp, Chelsey Ng, and Stephanie Salgado. Design includes Jamie Amadruto and Trey McGee (Sound), Lauren Barber (Scenic), Michael Barnette (Fight Choreography), Corina Chase (Costume), Elizabeth M. Stewart (Lighting), and Kellyn Thornburg (Dance Choreography). Run time is one hour twenty minutes, no intermission.
“Noirtown” runs at Teatro LaTea Theatre at The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center (107 Suffolk Street) as part of the Rave Theater Festival until August 25. For more information, please visit https://ravetheaterfestival.com/
Photo by Carly Hoogendyk of Nik Duggan, with audience, in WITNESS’s “Noirtown” at the Rave Theater Festival.