This isn’t your daddy’s Chekhov.
Popping up twice this month alone, the melancholy Russian continues his run as New York’s most popular dead playwright. But don’t expect anything traditional, because those new productions are part of Performance Space 122’s offbeat Coil Festival, whose eighth edition starts today in venues spread over Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Take, for starters, the Half Straddle company’s “Seagull (Thinking of You).” Tina Satter, its writer/director, says the 75-minute show consists of “texts from various translations of ‘The Seagull’ merged with my own meditation on that play’s themes. There are traces of the original plot and moments that track what the relationships feel like to me.”
The casting is similarly audacious: The diminutive, mousy-looking Susie Sokol (“Gatz”) plays the flamboyant Arkadina, while Becca Blackwell (one of the naked stars of Young Jean Lee’s “Untitled Feminist Show”) plays a composite of several of the male roles.
As for Kristen Kosmas’ “There There,” it riffs on both Chekhov and a minor character from his “Three Sisters.” It sounds almost straightforward, but not really: This two-hander features an onstage translator and references to Christopher Walken — the premise is that Kosmas replaces him in a Russian tour.
The rest of the fest also requires audiences to leave their expectations at the door. But as diverse as its offerings are, there are some common threads.
“One is that this edition is driven by women,” says Vallejo Gantner, PS 122’s (male) artistic director. “In ‘Ruff,’ Peggy Shaw deals with her stroke in a vulnerable, quite heartwrenching way. Then there’s Annie Dorsen and Anne Juren’s dance ‘Magical’: It repositions iconic feminist performance art — and it’s also a slickly executed magic show!”
Even when a title sounds familiar, the piece itself may surprise you. Case in point: Radiohole’s “Inflatable Frankenstein.”
“In the past we’ve worked with film genres and we’re generally interested in horror,” says company member Eric Dyer. “The story of Frankenstein, which was a book then movies, has everything we want. But we go off in our own direction — we’re not going to showboat Boris Karloff.”
Functioning as a collective of writers/performers, Radiohole specializes in ramshackle, often goofy spectacles that frequently draw on abstract ideas. For “Inflatable Frankenstein,” Dyer says they boned up on French theorists.
“Their concepts are attractive and meaningful to us, but we play with them,” he says. “It’s never about hitting anybody over the head with a heavy idea — that’s not our job. Mostly we want people to come to our shows and have a really good time.”
One who may not necessarily have a good time is Gantner, the head of the fest. He’s scheduled to take center stage in Tea Tupajic and Petra Zanki’s “The Curators’ Piece (A Trial Against Art)” — as the accused.
“Tea and Petra survived the war in the former Yugoslavia and developed an anger about what happened,” Gantner says of the Croatian artists. “To them it symbolized a failure of culture to save lives. They created a situation where they gather all these curators who actually commissioned and booked the piece.”
Gantner will be scrutinized by a jury of his peers — other international artistic directors and festival types, who’ll zero in on the way he runs PS 122.
“It’s not scripted, but it’s structured as a series of games we play onstage,” he explains. “We critique and interrogate each other about what it is we do, and whether it’s worth anything. And there’s a 15-minute interrogation/attack of me and what I do. I know they’ve been going around asking people at other New York institutions what they think of me.”
This should make the participants’ post-show drinks really fun. Maybe the audience could go to those, too.
The Coil Festival runs through Jan. 19. For info, venues and tickets ($20 to $30), go to ps122.org/coil-2013
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