The Brooklyn Rail

It was late October—on the last day of her honeymoon, no less—when Julia Greer got the call. The New York Times would be running a story on the Connelly Theater, a beloved East Village bastion of experimental work that housed off-Broadway hits including Kate, Salesman之死, Circle Jerk, and Futurity.

The Connelly was also the planned home for Kallan Dana’s Racecar Racecar Racecar, the newest production from Greer’s theater company The Hearth, which works to close gender gaps. But the venue’s landlord, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, had abruptly begun to scrutinize the work taking place on the Connelly’s stages. After the church quashed a planned production of Becoming Eve, a play centered around a transgender woman, multiple productions collapsed, and Josh Luxenberg, the venue’s director and general manager, resigned in protest.

Greer raced to find a new venue for Dana’s fast-paced, unsettling new work, which abstractly traces a father and daughter’s road trip across the United States. Ultimately, a challenging moment for the city’s theatrical ecosystem would also confirm the community’s generosity, as Hell’s Kitchen venue A.R.T./New York Theatres stepped in to host the show at a greatly reduced rate.

Greer and Dana spoke with the Rail about reckoning with censorship and finding a new home for Racecar Racecar Racecar. The Brooklyn Rail also spoke to multiple artists associated with the Connelly, which has now suspended all operations, who shared their favorite memories of creating work at the historic venue.

Joey Sims (Rail): Kallan, what inspired you to write Racecar Racecar Racecar?

Kallan Dana: The inspiration has a formal element and also a personal element. From a playwriting perspective, I wanted to write a road trip play with short scenes. I’m very pace and tempo-driven as a writer and very inspired by María Irene Fornés and Caryl Churchill. I’m interested in language that feels really electric and exciting theatrically.

The personal element was exploring the distortions of subjectivity—the gap between how we remember things from childhood, and what the reality might be. I know that I personally remember things from my childhood in a really different way from my siblings. And there’s no way to reconcile that, because we can’t go back in time. We just have our internal experiences. So I wanted to theatricalize that.

Rail: Did you draw specifically upon road trips from your own youth?

Dana: My family did go on a lot of road trips. Some elements of the play are directly from my own family history, and then there’s other elements that I’ve distorted. Elements of my relationship with my dad are definitely in there, but again, it has been obscured and distorted.

Rail: Julia, why was this play a fit with The Hearth’s mission of both supporting emerging writers and uplifting women, trans, and non-binary artists?

Julia Greer: The play takes very seriously this woman’s experience and story, a story that might often be thought of as a B-plot. She and her sisters get to be strong, and complicated, and messy. The female characters get to just fully exist, and we take them seriously. Women on stage talking, man!

Rail: Talk me through the sequence of events around losing the Connelly space.

Greer: We started to hear some rumblings, and then the Times reached out to me for a comment. It became pretty clear to all of us, once we learned the types of stories they were censoring and the types of artists they were stopping from doing plays there, that it would not feel right to do a play there at all—for anyone, but much less this play, and much less a Hearth play.

So we reached out to every place possible with a seat and a room and a light in New York City. Miraculously, through a lot of help and support from other people, we were able to find a place to do the play on the exact same timeline, and even the exact same dates.

The church did end up pulling the approval. But by that point the Connelly staff had resigned, there was no one working there, and we had already decided to make other plans.

Rail: There is a disturbing rightward trend across so many cultural and societal areas of American society right now. The Church’s move here feels connected to that shift, which of course the work of The Hearth is pushing against.

Greer: In light of the election, telling a story about women actually feels important. That shouldn’t feel so “important” anymore, but it somehow still is. It’s an act, and a choice.

Rail: Julia, has it become harder for smaller itinerant companies like The Hearth to find affordable venues in New York?

Greer: Absolutely, the options have dwindled. We couldn’t be in this A.R.T./New York space if they hadn’t given us a pretty nice discount because of the situation. We had conversations with theaters who wanted to give us really low rates, but then when they laid out the actual operating costs of their lease, building, and electricity, even that put it above what we could do. It’s hard for everyone, and as a tiny company with limited resources, we are definitely feeling it.

***

The Rail invited multiple artists associated with the Connelly to reflect on the work created under the leadership of Director and General Manager Josh Luxenberg.

Josh Luxenberg
Director and General Manager, Connelly Theater, 2014–24

The Connelly Theater, in a quintessentially New York way, was built in the cracks. Technically, the Connelly Theater is a room in a building, run for a while by people who cared. When I started running the space in 2014, it was in disrepair, unsuitable for use by professional companies. I knew what it could—and should—be. I also knew that at some point, the Church might assert itself. For ten years, I was able to make the Connelly Theater into a space where artists and plays that embraced the diversity of human experience found a joyful home, despite the knowledge that it could all come to an end in exactly the way that it did.

We fought back, as best we could. When the Connelly Center—our employer, who is not an arts organization—decided that it had no more options to counter the Church’s decision, Mele Sabú Borges and I were instructed to screen incoming proposals to ensure we did not send anything to the Archdiocese that would not be approved—in other words, to become censors, and to discriminate against the very communities that had made the theater a vibrant, compelling, welcoming space. Put in this untenable position, we both resigned.

For now, the theater is closed. If it reopens, while it may retain the name, it will not be the same Connelly Theater that we ran. It will, once again, be a room in a building.

Taylor Reynolds
Director of Plano, presented by Clubbed Thumb, April–May 2019; and Man Cave, presented by Page 73, March–April 2022

The Connelly Theater has held a space in my heart since I moved to NYC. I would hope to have the chance to stage something within the ornate gold frame of the proscenium. After directing both Plano and Man Cave on the stage, I have an even deeper appreciation for the nooks and crannies that hold so many memories of productions and performers who have left their imprint on the space. I’m heartbroken that it has been shut down because theater artists want to tell stories that “don’t fit” within the rigid and unfair content guidelines set by the landlords, but both the shows I directed there put queer characters, ghosts, and a bit of the unholy onstage, and the impact of those stories and the countless others told there cannot be erased.

 

Lameece Issaq
Writer and performer of A Good Day to Me Not to You, presented by Waterwell, November–December 2023

A Good Day to Me Not to You takes place in a women’s rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side—a fictionalized version of an actual place I lived called Saint Agnes Residence. The play dances around Catholic themes and is a story of grief and weirdness and loneliness—all of which is buoyed by a kind of spiritual sensibility. I loved being in a space that was so storied—once a Catholic orphanage, now attached and supporting a Catholic girls’ school—it felt soulful and grounding to work and play there. The Connelly is the kind of place you only find in NYC, deep in the heart of the East Village. It will be missed.

 

Susannah Perkins
Appeared in The Good John Proctor, presented by Bedlam, March–April 2023

The Connelly’s rich history as a performing space is one you can physically feel when you’re in the building. It’s one of the most beautiful theaters I’ve had the pleasure of performing in. We premiered Talene Monahon’s very spooky The Good John Proctor there. Waiting to enter in the brick hallway backstage, or warming up alone in the dark lobby, or with the cast under the (iconic) gold proscenium, I frequently had the hair-raising but not unpleasant feeling that if I turned my head just slightly, I would see a ghost smiling back at me. It felt like a place where the veils were thin, and under Josh’s leadership, the Connelly’s innate quality of magic-about-to-happen was translated into really exciting art onstage.

 

Kristen Caesar
Artistic Director of Kidz Theater, youth company-in-residence for sixteen years

Kidz Theater started producing work at the Connelly in 2008 and the location, the grand scope of the theater and the affordability quickly made it our main home base. In the past sixteen years we have produced a huge number of productions at the Connelly and watched it grow from a funky (and sometimes dirty) downtown grungy space to a gorgeous little jewel box, so expertly maintained by Josh Luxenberg. In the beginning, the stage was full of huge holes, uneven and treacherous, but we filled that space with so much love that it didn’t matter.

We often get a lot of discrimination, because people assume we won’t know what we’re doing since we are a youth theater company—until they are blown away by the level of talent of the kids and completely surprised by the skill of our technical staff. Having this home at the Connelly where Josh knew us and supported us and happily gave us a home made things so much easier for our company.

 

César Alvarez
Performer/writer/composer/lyricist of Futurity, presented by Soho Rep and Ars Nova, October–November 2015

The Connelly was the site of the most ecstatic and successful moment of my creative life. I remember standing in the wings every night before the show; I could smell the popcorn from the lobby and hear the crowd buzzing. It felt like a sacred space for storytelling. It is truly the perfect theater.

 

Jack Serio
Producer/director of The Animal Kingdom, presented in the Connelly Upstairs, January–February 2024

It’s hard to quantify how seismic the loss of the Connelly Theater, at the hands of the greed, negligence, and continued hypocrisy of the Archdiocese of New York, is to the downtown theater scene and New York arts ecosystem in general. You could see the history of the theater in the layers of paint stacked up on the walls like sediment, each layer the handprint of an artist and a production who had come before you. It allowed artists who were used to working in tiny little spaces and basements and closets to make work in a place that felt like a real theater. It was an off-Broadway stage in the middle of Alphabet City that had a mezzanine and an ornate gold proscenium. It’s like the building itself legitimized the work you made there, raising it up, celebrating it, demanding audiences to take it more seriously.

The Connelly’s recent occupation of the intimate, fifty-one-seat, upstairs space felt like it came at the perfect time. It was affordable and offered a new opportunity in an increasingly shrinking landscape of spaces for artists and fledgling companies. It’s a loss that we’ll never get to know how that little space could have changed the downtown landscape.

 

Daniel Alexander Jones
Writer/performer of Duat, presented by Soho Rep, October–November 2016

Ephemeral art such as ours leaves traces. We closed Duat two days before the presidential election of 2016. The piece was about the afterlife. I’ve always sensed unseen beings and felt immanent futures unfolding through dream and vision since I was a child, though I rarely speak publicly about that aspect of my art-making. Staging this piece in the Connelly felt right; there are many ghosts present, echoes of past players trodding the boards, let alone the fact that it was originally home to an orphan’s choir. I tracked the virulence of the right wing for some time and had a pit in my stomach as the election approached. I felt the shadow approaching. I remember turning to Jacques Colimon and Tenzin Gund-Morrow, who played alongside me, as we sat at the lip of the stage on closing night. “Remember this,” I said to my little brothers. “It’s all about to change. Remember this.” I’m deeply saddened to learn of the cessation of this space, echoing the sorts of censorship metastasizing nationwide. I’m grateful that the work we did under the direction of Will Davis, its beauty and earnestness and emphasis of love and risk will haunt the space until things change again, however far away that turn lies.