The Brooklyn Rail

Playwright Walter Corwin is certainly no stranger to Theater for the New City, a pioneering off-off Broadway mainstay of the Lower East Side dedicated to showcasing both emerging talent and veterans of the New York City stage. Corwin’s work, often absurdist and, in the words of Rail colleague Dan Kelley, replete with fourth-wall-demolishing characters “unburdening to an audience meant to act as both therapist and jury,” is deeply intertwined with TNC’s fifty-year span.¹ It is also intertwined with the theater’s post-pandemic revival. After TNC’s Executive Director Crystal Field invited Corwin to stage a production coinciding with the 2020 United States presidential election, his productions have since been marked by their Biden and Trump-era political commentary.

In a landscape this divisive and fraught, “I don’t think I could write about anything else,” Corwin told me. The last five years of American political, social, and technological turbulence take the forefront of Corwin’s latest production, The New Normal. After nearly ten years of forcing ourselves to carry on with our lives, and all their mundanities, amidst a stream of neverending gut-wrenching news at every turn, The New Normal, on now through October 5, captures and confronts the lunacy of life under our wretched government.

The six-scene play features Kierney McAllister and Cole Ortiz-Mackes as its throughlines, assuredly and enthusiastically guiding us through a range of colorful characters and timely scenarios. First, in “Ask the AI,” we see Ortiz-Mackes as a politically malleable boss and McAllister as his sole remaining employee, trying to use AI as an antidote to our “White House of Cards” (one of the many sardonic zingers anchoring these scenes into a cohesive reflection of our times). Next, in “Goin’ Home,” McAllister is the misguided doctor of Ortiz-Mackes’s ailing patient, clutching and orating from his portable IV line. In the extended monologue “Crossing the Line,” Ortiz-Mackes, scribbling half-remembered Latin on poster paper, reckons with a certain Greco-Roman-inspired fascist architecture initiative.

While Corwin’s scenes make overt references to real world figures, particularly President Trump, his play occasionally veers symbolic. McAllister and Ortiz-Mackes play pensive gender-swapped versions of Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam in “Light the Light,” for example. “The New Order,” in which McAllister’s experienced college administrator squares off against Ortiz-Mackes’s bumbling plumber-turned-dean, borders on allegorical. Here, Corwin alludes to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s dubious and disinformation-riddled administration as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, representing the Trump administration’s hand-picked cadre of incompetent henchmen. Other times, Corwin broadly references topical events and themes without directly addressing them, like in “Nothing Works,” when a playwright and his wife visit their ailing friend who is implied to be a hospitalized coronavirus patient.

The production’s design, helmed by Walter’s son William Corwin, expands the twenty-seat blackbox theater into a multi-set stage. Though the show does not have backdrops, each scene takes place within a different side or plane of the stage; its sectioned blocking and minimalist set, paired with some inspired miming, create the illusion of wildly different environments. Its carefully designed and placed props, including a Greco-Roman column slightly offstage within the audience’s view and two clipboards hanging on the back wall, form an aesthetic throughline within the six scenes. William’s production design, paired with Lynell Perry’s lighting design, mines striking imagery from a low-budget production. One particularly memorable visual occurred towards “Light the Light,” when Lady Liberty’s torch falters to life against the stage’s inky depths as the characters become silhouetted with backlighting, highlighting the hollow state of a nation whose founding principles have been degraded into symbols.

At the end of “Nothing Works,” the playwright and his wife debate the futility of extending care in moments of catastrophe. “We don’t know if we are alive or dead,” reasons the playwright, reducing empathy into mere “gestures.” “If that’s all I can do, make a ‘gesture,’ that’s what I’ll do. I’m not giving in to Trump,” retorts his wife. Their arguments are emblematic of both sides of the frustrated liberal or leftist American’s psyche—the collective cynicism and nihilism these circumstances have forced us into time and time again. Ultimately, the “wife” character mirrors the hidden pockets of optimism we can access if we only look. Corwin’s invocation of politics, overt or allusive, will not satisfy every audience member (a small handful issued formal complaints about The New Normal’s political content during the performance I attended), but in the East Village, his candor largely gives voice to the audience’s ongoing frustrations.