Sound House

See it if you’re interested in new forms of theater, or theater that foregrounds sound design, or how theater can express discontinuities in character

Don't see it if you’re looking for a traditional play: Sound is featured here. Characters are highly stylized. The meandering plot has big willful gaps.

Also I found this piece & its characters endearing, if a little clunky (probably intentionally). The play features a young woman, an older man & an older woman. The older characters are refreshingly unglamorous. The older woman, English & delightfully spiky, is a visionary scientist of sound whose work never quite realizes its potential, in part because she & the play’s older man, her engineer, have a somewhat mysterious falling out. The younger woman, who lives in Harlem & longs for some connection with a departed mother who came from Dutch Haarlem, finally crosses paths the brilliant scientist of sound & bonds with her. But story here is secondary. The play is structured as 3 intersecting monologs, & the plot goes everywhere & nowhere, & the viewer (auditor) is better off surrendering to the layered sound & the sequences of stylized movement (too pedestrian to be called dance, but no less interesting for being so everyday), & to the charm of the distinctive, non-traditional characters.... Read more Read less