Tale of Madness at West-Park Presbyterian

The final installment of director Roman Polanski’s so-called
“Apartment Trilogy,” 1976’s The Tenant,
isn’t as well known as Polanski’s earlier films Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby. Starring Polanski himself as Trelkowski, a newcomer
to a Paris apartment house who gradually goes insane under the scrutiny of his
mysterious neighbors, The Tenant
is enigmatic, haunting and sometime frustratingly oblique. So what better way
to experience it than live, as part of Woodshed Collective’s ongoing love
affair with installation theater?

An elaborate and intricate project, The Tenant, which opened Aug. 24 and is performed free of
charge, boasts a script written by no fewer than six up-and-coming playwrights
and original scoring from Duncan Sheik and David Van Tieghem, and is spread out
over five floors of the historic West-Park Presbyterian Church parish house.

Woodshed Collective takes over West-Park Presbyterian Church
for their production of The Tenant.

“I grew up in New York, and I have a sort of essential
curiosity about what’s going on in the apartment next to you,” said Teddy
Bergman, who, along with Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Stephen Squibb, serves as
Woodshed Collective’s artistic director. “And the source material represents a
sort of nightmarish sense of that reality.”

The total immersion theatrical experience has been growing
in popularity (and critical acclaim) since Woodshed Collective first started
its installations with 2008’s 12 Ophelias,
staged in McCarren Park Pool. In 2010, The Transport Group scored a massive
success with their revival of The Boys in the Band, performed in an actual apartment; last year saw
productions in buildings as varied as the Goethe-Institut (Hotel
Savoy) and Hudson Hotel (Green
Eyes). And, of course, there was this past
spring’s site-specific breakthrough, Punchdrunk’s critical and popular hit Sleep
No More, a disorienting immersion into the
world of Hamlet staged in a Meatpacking District warehouse.

Far from being envious or feeling territorial, Bergman and
company are rooting for more experiences like that.

“It’s exciting that there’s more installation and
site-specific work going on here,” Bergman said. He praised companies that “try
to invest new spaces with theatrical power, and then try to reclaim theatrical
power for a new audience and put them in touch with what’s remarkable about the
form.”

Surely Woodshed Collective’s The Tenant is one of the more appropriate pieces with which to
experience the full force of theatrical power. Just as The Boys in
the Band put audience members in the same
room as the sozzled characters, so, too, do Bergman and his playwrights include
the audience in the increasingly fragmented world of Trelkowski and his
neighbors.

“The story kind of illustrates the sort of breakdown of the
modular society of this building, and all of the flaws inherent in it,” Bergman
said, harshly highlighting “people’s essential mistrust of one another and
people’s lesser instincts hiding just below the surface. That story, to me, is
a very exciting one to tell in an installation context. When we’re asking
people to walk around and look and explore, it’s a fun mirror to hold up to the
organism of the audience.”

Mounting a show written by six different playwrights, all
with different voices, was not the headache it might at first seem. “The
starting point for most of the writers was in the source material,” Bergman
said—material that included the original novella by Roland Topor that Polanski
adapted for his film. None of the playwrights was given an assignment; instead,
they were asked to list the characters they’d prefer to write.

“And there was some crossover, but it kind of worked out
wonderfully,” Bergman said with a laugh. “Of course, we were prepared for
everyone to fight over the landlord character.”

The worry that half a dozen different voices might clash
instead of mesh is rendered moot by what those half-dozen voices are working
on. “Some of that got ironed out over the course of drafts and the course of
the process,” Bergman said. “There is a sort of sense about genre that they’re
all tapping into but, I think, in certain ways, where stylistic divergences
appear makes sense in the piece. Each character is invested with an author’s
point of view. It’s form following content. It’s set in an apartment building
with many lives being led, and we want to give a distinct voice to all those
lives. I just think it’s so thrilling to encounter multiple voices in that
context, which to me, in certain ways, is a more accurate representation of
those lives.”

Telling a story as layered and complex as that of The
Tenant needed just the right space, and
Woodshed Collective hit the jackpot with West-Park Presbyterian Church. “We
wanted something with multiple floors and the ability to see from one room to
another with a kind of circuitous traffic pattern, so you feel kind of in the
maze of the building,” Bergman said. “This building really has it.”

West-Park is no stranger to the theater, either. Long a home
to Upper West Side theater companies like Riverside Shakespeare Company and
Frog and Peach, West-Park’s pastor, Robert Brashear, felt no qualms about
hosting such a sprawling theatrical endeavor. “When they approached us, we were
really in a pretty empty state,” Brashear said. “We were closed for
approximately three years, and came back here and were reclaiming what was some
seriously damaged space. After landmarking last year, we had to do this
ourselves. And with a parish house with significant water damage, the work that
Woodshed is doing helps us further down the path. We’ll have the benefit of
significant parts of our restoration accomplished.”

The arts have provided a major stepping stone for the
restoration of West-Park’s buildings. In addition to the repair work that
Woodshed Collective has necessitated, a June concert for victims of the
Japanese tsunami helped restore some of the church’s bathrooms, and a Three
Graces production prompted the church to bring the space up to code for Actors’
Equity.

That rough-around-the-edges aesthetic of West-Park is a perfect match
for both Woodshed’s immersive aesthetic and the tone of The Tenant.
As Bergman said, “Because both metaphorical and actual urban decay are topics
in the piece, an historical building like this, and one that definitely shows
its wear and tear on the surface, was essential.” Also essential, no doubt,
will be return trips to West-Park for the chance to follow another strand in
the web that Bergman and company have so carefully woven.