The Fever (La MaMa) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (9)
See it if The company asks/risks the audience to BE the show. Suprisingly moving & at times profound as we realize how interdependent we truly are
Don't see it if Audience participation IS the show & while you can get away with not doing so, you become weirdly compelled to do so. Trust factor high
See it if you would like to participate in an active exploration of the idea that every theater experience constitutes an ad hoc, 1-time community.
Don't see it if you cannot abide even the least coercive kind of audience participation. Read more
Critic Reviews (4)
"We often pay lip service to the idea that theater is a sort of secular communal rite, but the description applies to 'The Fever,' a lovely, haunting meditation on human connection...Much of show is made up of exchanges that could almost be described as the kind of 'mixer games' made to foster fellowship at corporate retreats. I know: shudder! But in 'The Fever,' they are infused with a humble physical - and literary - poetry that scrapes away synthetic sentimentality."
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"Browde and Silverstone are interested in citizen-performance...Here they turn almost completely to the audience for their casting needs. Formally, it's a beautiful inversion, but for me the piece itself had a claustrophobically sweet aspect. Browde and Silverstone deserve hearty applause for their creative restlessness within the new form they're carving out...If here things seem a touch too gentle and the writing a bit too clichéd, at least the iconoclastic approach is radical."
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"While the narrative lingers in the realm of the abstract, issues of identity, aging, loneliness, and isolation are cogently explored...There is almost no moment in the performance when one or more audience members aren’t performing along with the cast...There is lots of touching, a little giggling, and, surprisingly little resistance...The performance is so much about the magic of the mimetic and the incredible empathy this kind of doing can elicit."
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"Several problems crop up. First, they begin the show by hinting at characters and a situation...Then it’s dropped completely...As the final nail in the coffin, they then have a text read out that banally tells us what we just did and hopes for import...The cast chose to deliver most of their instructions/dialogue in a flat, affectless, style...Ritual can be powerful theater and there’s no need for 'story.' This was a scattershot, unsatisfying first draft, not a fully formed effort."
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Trailer
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