The Tenant

I got more blog hits out of Sleep No More than almost any other show, War Horse and The Motherfucker with the Hat being the only exceptions. It makes sense too. Going into a performance where you have to wear a mask, no one really tells you what it's about, and you know you're going to more or less be aimlessly wandering a few thousand square feet...it's intimidating. Maybe you want to make sure that no one is going to jump out of dark corners at you. Maybe you don't trust yourself to make the right choices with so much space and so little time and want some more direction. Maybe you just want to know where the naked people are (try the tubs). On the one hand, there's something thrilling in diving into this sort of experiential theater. On the other, it can be overwhelming, and sometimes confrontational art just isn't the order of the day. Personally, I love unsettling shit, but when I headed uptown to catch this year's OTHER five-floor, openly wandered theatrical presentation, The Tenant, I was feeling tired, under the weather, and just generally not up for stumbling about in the dark not knowing what to expect. As I waited outside, I checked out a review or two, and while in the end I'd say it wasn't necessary as The Tenant is even less interactive than Sleep No More, I'm nevertheless glad that I did since the reviews grounded me a bit in the plot.

There's the crucial difference between Sleep No More and The Tenant. The former is an impressionistic piece with characters pulled from Shakespeare and Hitchcock, but your enjoyment doesn't at all feel related to an ability to follow the particulars, even if throughlines do occasionally present themselves. The Tenant, while significantly lower-rent, is in some ways the more ambitious piece as it not only has a plot, it has a fairly traditional structure.

Trelkovsky searches for an apartment and ends up locating the custodian of one building attending to a tenant who tried to kill herself by jumping out of her window. As long as that apartment's available... This piece is presented in the basement of the building the show is presented in. Everyone is gathered together to watch a single opening and then sent off into the "apartment building" Trelkovsky takes his room in. Then shit goes crazy. Here's the storyline in a nutshell: the other residents are frigging crazy and try to drive him mad. He begins to believe they want him to kill himself just as the former occupant of his apartment did. And he may be right. They all seem to have it out for him--some find him a nuisance, some seem to hate him because he's Polish, and others just don't trust anybody new.

What was so completely fascinating about this project was that you could follow Trelkovsky and his descent into madness, or you could roam through his neighbors' apartments where talk would occasionally drift to him, but where independent story lines also made headway. Somehow, and even though I experienced it, I can't quite explain it, the entire thing felt manageable and as though it was always leading towards one inevitable end. It WAS, of course, but that it didn't feel forced or erratic or random is an incredible testament to the team of writers who assembled the piece.

Side by side with Sleep No More, a lot of The Tenant doesn't fare well in comparison. SNM looks to have cost millions. The Tenant easily cost in the thousands. The low thousands. The sets are chintzy and the sound design leaves a lot to be desired. The cast is wildly uneven. One or two performers are brilliant. The rest range from average to...let's say below average. Of course, there's another key difference: The Tenant is free. The price isn't reflected simply in the cheaper look. It also feel apparent in the deeply earnest, gung ho approach of all involved. These are people who are giving everything to the show they're in, and you can feel that commitment, even when it's filtered through a few amateur-hour elements.

The Tenant as a production is a beautiful marriage of high and low--technical precision and spirited ambition, and that marries well with the material which is sort of a high-minded horror-farce. Once people start doing drag, it's really anything goes. Based on a Roman Polasnki movie (itself based on a novel) that was panned upon release but later developed a cult following, the whole enterprise is a really good bad time. I'd love to go back again if I have the chance.

If anyone stumbled upon this review looking for where the nudity in THIS production is, I can't help you. I saw a sign warning of nudity, gun shots, and strobe lights. I missed them all.