The Brooklyn Rail

The performer Tiresias has a distinct ability to make the same show work in two completely different spaces.

As part of the Exponential Festival in January of this year, Tiresias (also known as Evan Silver, when not beguiling audiences) performed cryptochrome at We Are Here. Their musical celebration of biodiversity magically shrunk its industrial venue’s vastness: with throw rugs and pillows encircling a platform tucked toward the back of a cavernous factory floor, cryptochrome transformed a vacuum into a hearth for audiences to gather around.

In its current iteration, now playing through December 16 at Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre, cryptochrome trades out Bushwick grit for Chelsea couth without sacrificing intimacy or intention. Both We Are Here and the cell have sky-high ceilings; the cell’s are just coffered. Rest easy: the sumptuous two-story, converted brownstone gives off no whiff of pretension, and under Tiresias’s direction, the space is as welcoming as a campfire.

At the cell, there are chamomile, three-ginger, and mint teas to choose from (complimentary), and plush chairs or snug sofas to lounge in. Seating is arranged around a piano (legs lovingly chipped) so it’s easy to see and engage with other audience members. Conversation, and community, bubbled before the performance began; one woman chatted with people in the row behind her. Her friend, Lenora, would be teaching her how to make bread soon, and would anyone like to join?

All the while, Tiresias meanders the crowd, smiling and greeting. Wearing white face makeup with a branch traced across their cheek, Tiresias sported glittering, raven-black gloves with long, pointed fingers, glam and witch-like.

Bathed in the warm hue of five or so lamps, the cell’s aura of welcome harkens back to its history as a tenement house. (Tickets are also on the affordable side, starting at 20 dollars.) The cozy environment is fitting; when the show begins, Tiresias shares it is a meditation. There is no wrong way to be here, they say, so dance, watch, sleep, or let your mind wander. For those who really want to sprawl out, ascend to the second floor; the folks up there laid down on large couches and cast their gaze starward.

To charm the audience, Tiresias employs the second person throughout cryptochrome, their song cycle for living things. “You were not made for the morning,” they say, “but coffee was.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a coffee drinker or not: soon, you’ll become a hawk. And a dragonfly. A kingfisher, a rock lobster, and an ark-load of other creatures of the sky, land, and deep.

The deft pianist Tristan Allen accompanies Tiresias, whose dreamy, haunting score also features idiosyncratic études (co-written with Allen) to signify various animals. The mole’s song is sprightly, janunty, and staccato; the hawk’s soaring and majestic.

Actually, they’re more tunes than songs, melodies over which Tiresias—in a mellow, Terry Gross-ian voice—unspools poetic zoology. A snake’s “belly is a graveyard,” filled with voles and squirrels that can sate the serpent for months; the whale is “the oldest living ocean cartographer”; the mole’s nose “an instrument of odyssey.” Tiresias moves in and out of singing so fluidly they prove, even if you are not meditating, a spell has been cast. (At this performance, not even a microphone on the fritz could challenge the sorcery; Allen kept the piano twinkling and Tiresias displayed no alarm while fetching a fresh mic. Natural selection, too, comes for technology.)

A transporting opus, cryptochrome is also rather useful, calling to mind Heather Christian’s PRIME: A Practical Breviary, the debut episode of Playwrights Horizons’s Soundstage podcast series. In PRIME, Christian offered ways to start a morning, cement patterns, and recognize the divine in the everyday.

A breviary serves as one compass; cryptochromes are another. Found in plants and animals, these proteins assist with establishing circadian rhythms. Greek for hidden color, cryptochrome is like an internal north star, orienting the body in the direction it needs to go to enact a full life.

“How did we get here?” Tiresias asks throughout their performance. Helpful proteins may aid more than Google Maps.

Named for the blind prophet of Greek mythology, Tiresias also uses cryptochrome to discuss their rare and incurable macular degeneration. Still, they know there is more than one method by which organisms find their way—moonlight, electromagnetic fields, and taste all create avenues.

In illuminating different ways of literally seeing the world, Tiresias evokes a queer sensibility, an otherness, while also revealing our interconnectedness. In each incantation of “you are a hawk,” “you are a mole,” and “you are a snake,” Tiresias invites us to consider our relationship to one another as part of, as Mary Oliver calls it, the “family of things.”

“If you cannot play the hero, you will play the sage,” Tiresias says. The animal kingdom is full of outliers, they also muse. And thank goodness.

Midshow, Tiresias recites one of Laura Gilpin’s most famous poems, “Two-Headed Calf,” in which the titular bovine looks up and sees “twice as many stars as usual.”

How would the calf describe how he sees? Or the crayfish, who tastes with their feet? Or the dragonfly, whose compound eyes, made up of thousands of repeating ommatidia, capture more than a drone ever could?

Perhaps there is more than one way to see; perhaps, through imagining other paths, we become more than one self.

Tiresias, the mythological figure, vacillates between many forms: male and female, deity and mortal. In christening themself with that ancient name, Evan Silver becomes a plurality: as one of the most enchanting performers in New York City, Tiresias is, indeed, sage and hero alike.

Soon, you will leave the comfort of the cell theatre. Wander, as Tiresias croons, underneath the moon. Let some bitterness dissolve; find your way to the subway, taking you somewhere familiar, or maybe somewhere new. Keep wandering. You’ve done it all before.