All Together Now (FringeNYC) NYC Reviews and Tickets

81%

(9 Reviews)

Positive

89%

Mixed

11%

Negative

Members say

Thought-provoking, Clever, Original, Intelligent, Absorbing

About the Show

Part of FringeNYC: An immersive experience: Only 20 audience members per show. Lie down for projected videos and uncommon intimacy. Animation plays a dreamscape overhead as this psychologist and Virginia Woolf scholar tells a story of love, betrayal, redemption, and...marrying a man just like Daddy.

Categories: Solo Show, Multi-Media, Local. Written by Ilana Simons.

FROM THE ARTIST:
An intimate audience of twenty lies down in a handmade tent for highly imaginative storytelling that evokes a proud and fantastical escape. Lying with strangers is electrifying, and recollects sleepovers in the backyard, with the awed stargazing of those nights. The writer and performer of this one-woman show, Ilana Simons, is a psychologist, literature professor, and animator who wrote this psychologically-rich narrative after her divorce, as a way to name childhood longings, or to learn why she married a man just like her father. She stitched the cloth walls of this tent and animated the intricate videos that project onto them. Simons embeds herself in the tent alongside her audience members to deliver an uncommonly evocative and beautiful reverie of love and loss.

Ilana Simons is a clinical psychologist, Virginia Woolf scholar, and animator. She is the founder of Tin House Reels, an online site for short videos at Tin House magazine and a writer for Psychology Today. Her short animations have premiered at Sundance and been featured online at sites like Hyperallergic and Electric Literature, where her short animated film about Haruki Murakami garnered 30,000 views. She is the author of A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (Penguin), and collaborated with Alain de Botton on his Great Writers series. She has performed her work at The Flea, the Nuyorican Poetry Café, and the Moth and lives in Brooklyn.

Features artistic contributions from Eamonn Farrell, director and media designer of Anonymous Ensemble, who has worked extensively with Mabou Mines, Jessica Scott, and with theaters like HERE.

This is an immersive show with a limited number of audience members let in each night. a special storytelling experience.

Member Reviews (9)

Ambitious, Clever, Intelligent, Thought-provoking, Original

See it if You are interested in exploring creative and psychological relationships between women and men and the relationship to art, and enjoy dance

Don't see it if You have a short attention span, average or lower intelligence or a bad back or cannot lie on a hard floor for extended period

Creative, Personal, Thought-provoking, Quirky

See it if You enjoy alternative forms of storytelling - this one involves projections, movement, and lots of the author's original and interesting art

Don't see it if You find "memoir" style narratives to be self-involved; you have a knee-jerk aversion to stories about "first world problems"

Critic Reviews (2)

“A deep exploration with a vague arc rather than a forward-moving narrative, and it washes over you rather than confronts you...Though formally excellent, the show's content fell short of my expectations: its stakes seem low. The underlying questions it considers are relevant to everyone, but they are not presented in a way that feels pressing...Anyone who appreciates subtle beauty, whimsy, and wandering complexity will find much to marvel at and mull over.”
Read more

“I loved every part of this production and its sumptuous visual artistry...Ilana Simons is a gifted storyteller, an observant documentarian of dysfunction, an accomplished author and defining shaper of imagery, and a phenomenal artist. There are only 20 spaces available for each ‘show,’ so make sure you get one of these defining floor mats for teleporting to the inner world.”
Read more