The Brooklyn Rail

The project management triangle states, “Good, fast, cheap—choose two.” The same principle might apply to the quality of a work directed, choreographed, and written by a single artist.

In Raja Feather Kelly’s BUNNY BUNNY, which ran at The Invisible Dog Art Center March 13–15, the direction is urgent, the choreography dynamic, and the text saltless. Hat tricks are rare. Kelly, as multiple projects have proved, is assured in each element: in A Strange Loop, characters’ movement stemmed from situation over spectacle, revealing the surreal in daily bullshit and longings, and, in The Fires, his writing illuminated the creative and sociocultural obstacles trapping three generations of queer men in a railroad apartment, inviting his direction to take on its own choreographic quality—the men, from different eras, simultaneously inhabited the home without ever so much as brushing shoulders.

Like the men in The Fires, BUNNY BUNNY’s young adults are also trapped inside. Or maybe they’re not adults—wearing leporine masks and cute ears, and sometimes bounding around on all fours or feasting on romaine, these characters may actually be bunnies. It’s unclear why, and perhaps unimportant, but it does render the whole story, well, fuzzy.

Together, the six roommates live in Raphael Mishler’s warm suggestion of an apartment, lovingly designed with a dart board, a mishmashed sextet of Craigslist dining chairs, and a neon No Vacancy sign for the bathroom. (StreetEasy, what’s the rent?) One “bunny” dreads the outside world, two are newbies met with skepticism, two attempt a situationship, and one—and only one—is allowed to leave and return with food and other vital supplies.

They have names, but there’s not much to them beyond the above descriptors. The world is at its most solid when Kelly captures the ecstasy and claustrophobia of living with besties: one moment they’re enjoying group dinner, bumping to “Fergalicious,” and another they’re jonesing for distance, stifled by incessant intimacy.

Why these characters can’t leave is never explained, calling to mind Abhishek Majumdar’s 9 Kinds of Silence, seen at PlayCo in 2023, in which the play always told you its regime was totalitarian but never succeeded in sharing how or why. Without rules to define it, dystopia becomes unpoetic.

BUNNY BUNNY’s program points to historical instances of oppressive surveillance (McCarthyism, Trumpism), but also to more self-imposed hypervigilance, like on “The Real World” and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” where curating how the world sees you means ensuring the world always sees you. In performance, Kelly seems more concerned with the effects of such scrutiny; its origins needn’t be explained in the politically splintered, reality TV vortex that is 2025 America. Still, intrigue alone doesn’t yield insightful narrative.

“I am oppressed, I am depressed, I can’t write”; “We have rules”; “This is the only way”; “I’m scared we’re all going to die”; and other lines limit channels for accessing the characters and, for the actors, offer narrow modes of expression.

Nonetheless, the tireless ensemble—six performers (Alexandria Giroux, Amy Hoang, Chris Bell, Dylan Contreras, Nelson Mejia, and Sara Gurevich) with Kelly’s dance-media company, the feath3r theory—embodies the madness of confined, agoraphobic life. Ricocheting off one another as hundreds of days pass indoors, they become superheated atoms, inflamed and kinetic, craving any newness that a collision might bring. Navigating multiple set pieces, performers, and an audience within tripping distance, Kelly’s work here is symphonic.

Watched by the outside world, the characters also watch each other. They perform TSA-style pat-downs when the one who can leave returns, and every line of dialogue is spoken into mics—nothing in the apartment is sacred. Plus, cameras they wield capture each other’s movement, projecting it onto Invisible Dog’s walls alongside cuts of other videos related to surveillance: Red Scare hearings, clips from “Scandal,” a roaming tabby caught on a home security camera.

As I took my seat for the performance, one of the performers saw me examining her and then, skittish, turned away. Perhaps I, the audience, was the outside world causing the bunnies such distress. I’m not positive, but watch them and scribble notes, I did. And when the camera turned my way, projecting my seat companions onto the wall, I felt exposed. I put my pen down.

Where Kelly offered a maximalist meal, Joshua William Gelb addressed surveillance in a more distilled form. I heard that Gelb’s show, [Untitled Miniature], presented by Theater in Quarantine at HERE Arts Center March 18–25, would feature Gelb in a confined space. But when I walked into HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, I first saw Gelb on a screen, one smaller than a sports bar TV.

An attendant welcomed me and said I could wander to take the performance in. I asked if the performer was in. How silly, and horrified, I was to learn he very much was: the screen I saw was merely the backside of a floating box Gelb used as his stage.

Exercising a form of endurance theater, Gelb was naked, cramped, and filmed by a camera in a Ring light that live-streamed his performances online, where audiences could comment in a feed.

“Does he need help or…?” read one comment on a neighboring screen that projected the feed.

Stuck in a 34 inch wide by 19 inch tall box, Gelb performed in fetal position variations for 45 minutes. He found elaborate ways to rotate positions, not that any was cozy. With his torso folded over his thighs, which were folded over his shins, he embodied child’s pose without the luxury of extended hands or sujud without the benefit of raised hips. If a program were available, I’d hope a chiropractor were thanked.

Such contortionism yet simplicity of performance underscores Gelb’s thesis: when our bodies are made for viral content, how bare can they be to score clicks and comments? While nude, Gelb was sprinkled with chalk. When he shimmied or repositioned, and the dust flurried out of the box, the first thing I thought was, pixels?

Gelb’s was a wordless, but not grunt-less, performance. Thrashing around at one point, it’s a wonder the box (upheld by a ballast), or his vertebrae, did not crack. It was not easy to witness—but, a few feet away, audiences could sit along the perimeter of the space and watch Gelb on a panel of nine screens that blocked his actual self. Watching his body projected afforded some distance.

That may be Gelb’s point. What do I stare at, numbly, each day on the screen that fits in my pocket? And when I’m not absorbing atrocities on it, what ridiculousness do content creators cook up, or endure, to win my eyeballs?

Scrolling and refreshing, I feel a sense of powerlessness, or perhaps inaction. I sensed that, too, at [Untitled Miniature]—besides screens and seats, the only other apparent set piece was a First Aid kit, right there, unvarnished, feet from Gelb’s scrunched body.