As one-time proprietors of Brooklyn’s late and much lamented DIY space Life World, Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey have already lived through the artist’s pain of building up and then losing a scene. A long goodbye to an imaginary experimental theater that takes the form of experimental theater itself, Open Mic Night’s recursions and subversions reveal the easy fellowship that comes from mixing dark rooms, cheap beer and a small crowd facing the same direction. This pressure cooker of tension, risk and awkward engagement teases wisdom and community as a reward, but is that the carrot or the stick? In the end, Open Mic Night is less stand up crowd work than it is an elegiac to the black box as Proustian madeleine. Or maybe it’s just your chance to finally shout out your BFF to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together?” If you want to know what it’s really about, I guess you just had to be there. Will you be there?
Presented by Mabou Mines & Performance Space New York as part of the 2024 Under the Radar Festival.
