The Brooklyn Rail

There’s a great reverence for performance in Marta Nesspek Presents. The play’s characters, a traveling troupe of actors, set up their projection before they, together, trace a rectangle on its screen with their hands in an act mirroring a religious rite. One actor fixates on perfecting her performance, wondering if that means perfecting her (already straight, pearly) teeth. Even the silent bartender kills time by reading an actor’s biography: Brando.

That bartender serves both performers and audience, and the line between them is intentionally thin in Kate Pressman’s play. At this staging of Marta Nesspek Presents, produced by Twenty-Three Point Five Degree Tilt Theater Company, you are part of the ten-person studio audience coming to watch a trio of performers do voiceover for Nesspek’s films—narrative flipbooks, hand-rendered by Pressman in ink. “Glorious monochrome,” as one actor says in the show-within-the-show’s curtain speech.

A kind of live, touring Turner Classic Movies, the short films offer a retrospective of Nesspek’s fictional canon. They also change with each production. In this iteration, sold out through its July 12 run, three genre films are shared: a noir, Regency romance, and Frankenstein-esque drama. Marta Nesspek Presents, directed by Logan Reed, travels around New York, and currently those with a ticket are invited to experience it in a Prospect-Lefferts Gardens ground floor apartment. Shoes off, please.

The previous run was in Washington Heights this past spring, but, in the world of the play, it’s unclear where the three voiceover artists last performed. There’s a lot of talk of “the tour”—but where they’ve been and how long they’ve been on the road (weeks? decades?) is besides the point. Or rather, dwelling on it only takes away from the work itself. “The broadcast is the broadcast is the broadcast,” one voiceover actor says between films. “And everything else is incidental.”

The characters do have names, but they’re seldom mentioned—the three voiceover actors (played by Dylan Guerra, Madalena Provo, and Anik Zarkos) are more defined by the parts they play than their own personas. An endless loop of packing, plane rides, and presentations has nearly stripped the threesome of their identities as they become (very talented) cogs in a (very popular) machine.

Marta Nesspek Presents, then, is a stark reflection of theatermakers’ work: in a precarious and underpaying industry, how much of your personal life matters when you’re set with a good show?

And what a show it must be: Nesspek creates a product so alluring it keeps its voiceover artists vying for plum roles and more drawn to the tour than the outside world—or their interior lives.

As the physical hands that turn the flipbooks’ pages, Pressman appears in the show as a representative for Nesspek; cool and distant, Pressman’s character presides over the page turning’s pacing and captures missives from the Marta Machine, a mini thermal printer that tells the voiceover actors when to change roles and where they are performing next.

Nesspek is Big Brother, and the performers’ obsession with her is absolute. One missive tells an actor to, after a performance deemed middling, switch into the butler track for the Regency romance. Ouch.

“I knew this was coming,” the teeth-sensitive performer says. “I could feel it in the air.”

It’s all a bit dark, but does it matter when Nesspek’s art is so amazing?

Nesspek creates films so deliciously charming she makes it impossible to criticize the genius. Here, Pressman sets a high bar for herself—and the flipbooks are astounding. Dramaturgically, it tracks.

A delightful form of cinematic puppetry, Nesspek’s flipbook films are more than just individual pages of narrative. Each page—or perhaps film frame—holds magic. Spliced and layered to allow pop-out surprises, and magnificently alive even in black and white, Nesspek’s creations transport and enchant, behaving more like a book of spells than stories.

In the noir, streetlights act as establishing shots for an exterior scene, but peek closer: in the fuzzy glow beneath the lights, an incision is made to allow the film characters’ silhouettes to pop out. Soon, they are chasing one another, light after light. In the romance, a waddling of ducks charts a castle’s moat. In the monster drama, trapdoors open inside the lab. All the while, original scores timed to the line (by Josh Brown, Alex Minier, and Grace Oberhofer) push the narrative along.

There’s plenty of splendor, and always another cranny to explore, keeping the voiceover actors enticed stop after stop. (Annie Hoeg’s costumes—a cowboy hat, a bathing suit, a faux fur stole—revel in the random items the actors have nabbed along their ping-ponging travel, their goofy outfits an assemblage of cross-country debris.)

Separated from reality, the voiceover artists find varying ways to still understand a use for their body for something other than their work. One, the gay man, drinks and flirts with the bartender, who, again, does not speak. “Did you hear? We’re off tonight,” he croons to no response. “I know, words fail.”

Pressman deftly employs humor to highlight the various defense mechanisms actors can use to laugh at, but not be vulnerable with, the plight that is a never-ending job in which you are powerless. Another actor, the pragmatist, is more confrontational with her relationship to work.

“She’ll never stop. She’ll use us until there’s nothing left and then discard us somewhere along the route,” she says of Nesspek. But then she gets sadder, looking at the audience.

“I know these are new people. Different people from the last time, and the time before, and the time before that. I know that. It’s always new people. But they don’t look any different,” she laments. “They’re all the same.”

But it is the final actor, the teeth-sensitive one, and the most impressionable among them, who tries to reach out and connect with each place she lands, and calls home, even if for a day. That ridiculous faux stole she’s wearing? “I got this there,” she points to a shop out the window, a block or so away. Maybe tomorrow she’ll try and find it again.

But Marta Machine hums again: another tour stop beckons. Nesspek’s audiences are hungry, and appropriately so. What Marta Nesspek presents is a wildly inventive cinematic form, but Marta Nesspek Presents exposes its industry’s fetid underbelly.

Something else is captured: the ephemerality of performance.

“I’m going to miss this room,” the impressionable one says.

“You’ve spent an hour in this room,” the pragmatist replies.

“Sure. But I thought it was lovely, didn’t you?” she asks.

The others, done packing for the hundredth, the thousandth time, roll their suitcases out, but she lingers a moment longer. It is, it really is, a lovely room.