The Brooklyn Rail

They wore bandanas, ballcaps, and bucket hats. Some sported June’s first tans-gone-wrong, backs of necks rosy. One, in diapers, fired bubbles from a lime-green gun.

Another, now too big to fit into a stroller, pushed her own—a mini, but still. Some sold lemonade (canned) and pulled pork sandwiches (fennel slaw-ed). On one: a patterned shirt with various “I”s, “am”s, and blocks of Swiss cheese. Jorts were everywhere—as were these strangers, who, on June 4, 2025 in and around Domino Square’s riverside amphitheater, became a spectacle for each other, before the real show began.

At mainstay institutions, pulling audiences from their couches and Netflix remains tricky. Theater subscribers are dwindling, as are theater seasons, as are theaters themselves. Beyond New York, the White House remains intent on gutting national parks’ programming and protections. It can feel antithetical, in 2025, to expect cultural offerings to entice and multiply—but with a sweet name doubled, Sugar, Sugar! just might.

A new arts series at Williamsburg’s Domino Square curated and creative-produced by Public Assembly and Ellpetha Tsivicos, Sugar, Sugar! offers free performances each Wednesday and Thursday in June. No-cost, public, and outdoor summer series are vital—and in being no-cost, public, and outdoors, they tend to feature recognizable programming to catch a larger audience. Shakespeare in the Park broadcasts the Bard, Paramount+ Movie Nights in McCarren Park screens popular titles, and countless al fresco concerts boom John Philip Sousa. Leaning experimental, Sugar, Sugar! brings multidisciplinary fare normally reserved for specific venues (or basements) into the open air.

Technically, the program’s four weeks are themed—theater, dance, music, puppetry—but they might as well all sleep together and invite you to their mutant baby’s christening. No gifts needed, just an open mind.

A quarter through this century, Brooklyn’s northern waterfront has followed a trend: deteriorating factories close, cost-prohibitive apartments replace them, and artists move farther inland, living in high-rises’ shadows. In an effort, then, that is inherently countercultural, Sugar, Sugar! moves artists from shadow to sunlight, inviting neighbors to witness inside-baseball creatives who have long presented at avant venues like The Brick, House of Yes, and National Sawdust.

Passersby took note. At 7 p.m., those who signed up in advance nabbed seats with East River views, but if you didn’t register online, no trouble, sit where you like. Domino Park’s serpentine paths let commuters, dog walkers, and families all criss-cross in its square’s nucleus—the modern amphitheater—and, if drawn in by the crowd or “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” bouncing from the speakers, they might pause and sit.

Public spaces hold a special potential: the power to invite. “Cities are, by definition, full of strangers,” Jane Jacobs wrote in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and as such, she argues, their architects have a duty to find creative ways to connect us:

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity… Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.

On Sugar, Sugar!’s opening night, large numbers of people indeed entertained themselves by watching street activity. The constellation of random people, vendors’ commerce, and upbeat music enacted Jacobs’s theory that to bring people together is to create multiple avenues for entry.

Showtime, 8 p.m., approached. The sun lowered over StuyTown, then Midtown. In flower banks along the amphitheater’s sloping seats, foxgloves stood strong as Lady Liberty, still visible across the river despite accumulating wildfire haze. Running clubs—ambulatory Bumble—dashed by.

Then, the actual show began.

June 4’s double bill, guest curated by Theresa Buchheister, featured Nile Harris opening for maximalist movement goofballs Lena Engelstein and Lisa Fagan. As he did in his show Temporary Boyfriend earlier this year, Harris entered on a Citi Bike, circling first the stage’s circumference and then his thoughts.

Holding a mic, he mused in a poem on the legacy of experimental artists, like Richard Foreman, and his own particular performance style—how unaccepted it seemed, to institutions, to himself—leading him to consider Spalding Gray, the monologist who jumped off the Staten Island Ferry and whose body was found in the river mere feet from where Harris stood.

Contemplating the worth of his own artistry while also acknowledging his status as Sugar, Sugar!’s debut artist, Harris hopped across ideas, reading an excerpt from the Village Voice where Michael Feingold discussed the need for a Secretary of the Imagination, then bemoaned how critics today tend to summarize instead of analyze. (Noted.)

It was all head, which meant id had to come crashing in. Enter a dinked Pontiac Vibe, tonight’s clown car.

Harris’s act was over because Engelstein and Fagan had driven through it. Sorry to the environment, but car beats bike. Harris exited the asphalt stage, giving Engelstein and Fagan, in New York standards, a football field’s worth of area for parking. They could not find a space.

Reversing, jerking, and turning, they settled on—oh!—this spot right here, no different from any other.

How to describe an Engelstein and Fagan performance? It’s as if they’ve sprinted up Mount Etna, threw Coke, Mentos, and Fruity Pebbles into a crater, and watched it erupt to study how their bodies could replicate such technicolor tumult.

Their performances do not strive for “plot,” but here’s maybe what happened in their work in progress, This Could Be You.

After struggling to find a parking spot with nothing but space around them, the idiocy of colonizing continued. Armed with a fuschia clipboard and dumb smile, Fagan surveyed the open land around her, ripe for manifesting destiny, while Engelstein mounted a New York City compost bin and rode it like a rancher. How now, brown cow?

Engelstein, a human gazelle, then ran across the diameter of the stage and leaped over strewn props. Just some derby tricks—there’s too much real estate to activate. Fagan squirted some Heinz onto a tiny highway billboard to claim even the sky and then gobs of suntan lotion onto herself: far away, more colonizers were approaching, and their high beams were getting hot on the skin.

Transition! Engelstein and Fagan become those next colonizers: New York realtors. Skin sticky, Fagan pulled watermelon-red pants over her snake boots and over-lotioned legs. Engelstein donned a blonde wig—blazers on, girls, it’s time to sell.

Over a ludicrous untz untz beat that would induce a hangover sans alcohol, Engelstein and Fagan raced around the debris of the Colonial Era to get up close with audience members to lease apartments.

Fagan: “Together we’ll manifest your dreams, no compromises, I’ll be by your side morning, noon, and night—happy hour, too.”

Engelstein, with vocal fry: “I’m Jan, and I love sunsets.”

Over the nightclub beat, their phrases repeated and repeated, but what more does a hotshot Williamsburg renter need than access to sunsets and happy hours?

If the Pontiac’s glory days were in the late aughts, they were revived tonight. As Fagan drove and Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” blared, Engelstein stood atop the car, reaching out to the crowd.

“Some of you over here are getting me!” she hurled. “And this group over here for sure! And it makes me feel like something’s happening here, because I love what I love and you love what you love and we both love this skyline!”

It was the demented gentrifiers’ final coup; not even the sunset could compete.

Surrounded by luxury buildings, This Could Be You was no subtle commentary; per StreetEasy, the median rent for a Williamsburg studio is 3,700 dollars.

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves,” Jacobs wrote.

Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management owns one of the adjacent high-rises, One Domino Square, and privately funds Domino Park, whose existence reveals a paradox: the free park that brings people in is bankrolled by the high rents that price people out.

At 8:40 p.m., as Engelstein surfed atop the Pontiac, the Williamsburg Bridge lights turned on. Every evening, it’s a timed show for the residents of One Domino Square, who can almost reach out their windows and touch the bridge, the sunset, Jan’s beloved skyline. From the amphitheater, looking up at that building’s north side, only a fraction of the windows were aglow but enough to illuminate a stack of identical layouts, gleaming kitchen after gleaming kitchen.

No one seemed home, or at least was visible, except one man. Inside his unit maybe a dozen stories up, he stood at the window, curious. He was looking down at the park.