Theatergoers and postal customers mingle during “Manna-Hata,” starring Everett Quinton and staged in the Beaux-Arts postal building. (AP/Kathy Willens)
Theatergoers and postal customers mingle during “Manna-Hata,” starring Everett Quinton and staged in the Beaux-Arts postal building. (AP)
Theatergoers and postal customers mingle during “Manna-Hata,” starring Everett Quinton and staged in the Beaux-Arts postal building. (AP/Kathy Willens)
It’s a post office — New York’s main branch — on its way to becoming an Amtrak train station. For now, though, the historic James A. Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue is also a theater, where you can see the Peculiar Works Project’s latest immersive production — and send an Express Mail while you’re at it.
“Manna-Hata” — the name comes from the Lenape tribe’s name for Manhattan — is a sprawling, episodic look at the city’s past 400 years. And it unfolds in a suitably sprawling setting: the 1912 Beaux-Arts building designed by the famed architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White.
Written by Barry Rowell, one of the troupe’s founders, the show features 21 performers — downtown favorite Everett Quinton among them — playing more than 100 roles, including such historical figures as Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shirley Chisholm, Mayor Jimmy Walker and developer Robert Moses. The story starts with the purchase of Manhattan island and goes up to the present day.
At one point the actors put down strips of yellow tape to illustrate the creation of the city’s grid street system. Later, they string up rope and light bulbs to depict the newly built Brooklyn Bridge.
Wear comfortable shoes, because you’ll be walking across that bridge — and up and down hallways, stairways and vast spaces, some of which have been off-limits to the public. One vast empty space, spanning two entire blocks from 31st to 33rd streets, was once the post office’s main sorting room.
Movie mavens may recognize it from “Miracle on 34th Street” as the place where a mailroom worker comes up with the idea of sending letters addressed to Santa Claus to the courtroom where Santa’s on trial.
“The beauty of the location is that you can do things that you can’t in a regular theater,” Rowell adds. “That great room shows the vastness and scale of Manhattan before anything was built on it.”
“Manna-Hata” is the latest in a series of works staged by the company, whose previous productions include “Off Stage: The West Village Fragments” and “Off Stage: The East Village Fragments” that were performed on each neighborhood’s streets. Rowell says that his dream space would be the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, but it’s been closed for security reasons since 9/11.
“That’s the fun thing about doing site-specific theater,” he says. “You can’t walk anywhere without thinking, ‘What kind of performance could I do there?’ ”
“Manna-Hata” runs though June 23 at the James A. Farley Post Office, 425 Eighth Ave., entrance on 31st Street. Tickets, $18, at 866-811-4111 or peculiarworks.org.