For two weeks, unsuspecting passersby on East 4th Street in New York City will have no idea what’s unfolding upstairs in the second-floor auditorium of the La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre. “Class Dismissed,” an off-Broadway production from the wild minds of Robert Lyons and Daniel Irizarry, tells the story of professors and graduate students losing touch with reality and entering academia induced hallucinations.
On the theater’s website, the show is described as a hopeful imagination of the future that makes use of the whole space — including the audience: “Anticipate your (consensual) participation as we invite the audience onstage to eat bread, drink rum, write on the set with chalk and swap books that you bring to the show.” It also encourages attendees to bring a book, but that they might not leave with the one they came in with.
Upon entry, audience members were directed to the second-floor to mill and mingle before the show. My first sign that this would be a truly interesting night was when I saw a woman in the corner mixing dough and pouring it into three loaf pans before distributing the pans to three “bakers” in the audience. Notes from a trumpet spilled out from behind the theater doors as they creaked open to reveal an actor playing the instrument and beckoning us inside. Instead of the typical theater set-up, there were two rows of foldable chairs on either side of a big room. For those of us who didn’t know to bring one, a woman wheeled around a cart of books to be used later. The audience was treated like a classroom of students, and over the course of the two-hour show, without your traditional intermission, I was trapped in an introvert’s nightmare and a budding actor’s wildest dream — an interactive piece of performance art.
The spectacle started with an a cappella number sung by three of the show’s four actors, in the dark, with a spotlight on the center of the stage. This was one of the few times they interacted, as the show was broken into “lectures” where each character took center stage. Soon after, a charismatic, purple-haired professor crawled out from behind a stage wall and began his rant about the “intentions of the unknown author.”
The first bit of audience participation involved the man sitting directly in front of me being asked to hit the professor with a pillow. Stranger still, the second eager participant said yes when he asked to lick his forehead, after which, the professor began vigorously peeling a root vegetable, which the audience discovered to be yucca, as the skins ricocheted off of them. The two students in the show exchanged dialogue rife with buzzwords like capitalism, ubiquitous, ambiguous, post-consumer, manifesto and pataphysical that often left my brain swimming with the ingredients to a woke word soup. The only references to the outside world came in one-off mentions of Joseph Stalin and Friedrich Nietzsche and, if you can believe it, an interlude of Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó” that involved the professor riding around the stage on a bike. The final character was another literature professor who waxed lyrical about a mysterious Nancy, writhing around on the floor with pieces of chalk, taking a sponge bath and churning butter from a bag of milk that descended from the ceiling.
Much of the dialogue felt like overhearing two classics majors comparing their favorite philosophers, a conversation that makes no sense to even them, but from which you cannot tear yourself away. At one point, the audience was asked to read aloud simultaneously from our books, causing an audible cacophony not dissimilar to the way my brain felt during the two-hour show. In some moments, it was difficult to tell whether or not the intention was to make a mockery of woke culture and academic superiority, or if it was telling me that taking more than the requisite two philosophy classes would’ve set me up for success.
Three “lectures” from the end of the performance, the bread was ready. The cast invited the audience onto the floor to enjoy fresh bread, the stage-churned butter and rum. The direction of “Class Dismissed” redefined going out with a bang. In the final minutes, empty doggie bags were handed out during a song about “rush hour at the helipad.” A long sheet of plastic was unspooled and stretched across both rows of audience seating while a tarp was laid out on the floor. The professor came out holding a golden sphere while the cast walked around with signs that said “solo es melón” and “it’s just watermelon.” To our (I’m speaking for the crowd here) great surprise, the final act of the show was the professor pulverizing the golden watermelon with a baseball bat and it exploding across the room. I left more sure about my stance on audience participation than the true plot of the performance.
When it comes to the New York City arts and culture, I am always game for something new and funky. “Class Dismissed” certainly hit, even surpassed, the mark and would be the perfect venue for any performance-curious individual. Perhaps, however, if you shudder at the thought of eye contact and a beckoning finger from a cast member, it might be best if you skip class.
