In Blue

See it if If you like si fi about rebels and a dystopian world. More reading than a plot line.

Don't see it if If you want a more traditional play. A play that moves swiftly through its story.

See it if you have a deep interest in German Expressionist art & would like to hear lots of letters from a minor practitioner of it read out loud.

Don't see it if you are expecting that a play about an interesting minor artist would give you some sense of the art he created.

Also The Blue Rider group of German Expressionists included major artists—Kandinsky, Klee—& less stellar figures of interest. One is Franz Marc, one-half of the 2-hander “In Blue.” It’s a problem that the play gives us no sense of the artist as artist or of his artwork. The other character is an eccentric woman writer who was a good friend of Marc’s only for a very short time. (She would later write an award-winning novel in which the artist is a character.) This leaves the character Marc spending much of his stage time reading from letters he wrote his wife (not a character) instead. Another problem is that no “scene” is long enough to stick: some are little longer than a few seconds. When a play manipulates setting & chronology as considerably as this one does, it has to give an audience something, anything to hang onto. A little art, maybe, to show us how interesting the best of Marc could be, might have gone some way to explaining why in the world we should care.... Read more Read less

See it if you are familiar with the premise of this play. I was influenced to see it by the description and expected to love it.

Don't see it if you don't like plays with mostly two people talking and a plot that was hard to follow

Also Luke Santy, as the musician, was creative and very enjoyable.

I think Alyssa Simon tried to use different accents but she was just hard to understand and the switch in her voice was often a surprise that made the story even harder to follow.

I think the premise of the play has merit but it did not work for me.

I saw this show at The Tank in NYC.... Read more Read less

See it if you'd enjoy a brilliant think piece that links time & fantasy with art & friendships, the bread of life. Creative script, acting, set, music

Don't see it if you dislike cerebral art (or fine art history); to enjoy this play requires both focus & imagination. An artwork gone missing, 82 years.

Also This rich work, w/ textured & poetic language & characterizations, recreates Franz Marc's 1913 Tower of Blue Horses, last publicly seen in a 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art.

It also explores & celebrates Marc's friendship w/ Else Lasker-Schüler (b. 1869), a German Jewish Expressionist poet & playwright, who fled the Nazis & lived in Jerusalem until her 1945 death 9 months before WWII ended.

Marc (Finn Kilgore) belonged to the Blue Rider school, w/ Wassily Kandinsky, plus native Germans & Russian immigrants.

Alyssa Simon (also seen in 10/2018 in Arendt-Heidegger) plays Else; she wrote Franz after he illustrated her poem, Versöhnung (Reconciliation) on a German newspaper front page.

You needn’t know any of this going into the play, though it helps.

But even w/o the background, the script, language, staging, puppetry, sound, music & acting carry viewers through 2 World Wars, art, poetry, & the meaning of friendship. Richly rewarding.

I'd love to see this again.... Read more Read less

See it if You want to see a non-traditional non-linear play that bridges fantasy with real people.

Don't see it if You want to see a traditional linear play.

Also I had a hard time following action and story. The play doesn't follow the same narrative through-out; sometimes the characters are speaking to each other, sometimes directly to audience, sometimes to a musician at the foot of stage. Nice design elements, but unable to wrap my head around the relationship of the two characters.... Read more Read less

See it if You are intrigued by a play that weaves historical fact, historical fiction, and fantasy into one show.

Don't see it if You want to see a traditional play.

Also The level of artistry attempting to be pulled off is very ambitious and sometimes works. But I did find it hard to follow and unsure of what the relationship between the two characters was.... Read more Read less

See it if The relationship between German painter Franz Marc and bohemian poet Else Lasker Schüler is at the core of this wildly theatrical play

Don't see it if written and directed by Ran Xia. The language is robust, surprising, and poetic, and the staging is full of inventive flourishes that

Also complement the play's expressionistic style. This is a play about an intense friendship and two people connecting through art, and across time and space. It's also about war, being the Other, and needing to feel secure and be seen. You may not follow every nuance of the action but it's a gorgeous experience regardless. It's also really funny in parts. The actors, Finn Kilgore as Franz and Alyssa Simon as Else, do superb work here. Musician Luke Santy provides a beautiful, rich live score, and set, lighting, and costume design are very well done.... Read more Read less