Imagine being in a long term relationship with someone who you see every day. By now you know all their quirks, tics and pet peeves. You know how they take their coffee, what their favorite song is, what side of the bed they prefer, and you can even complete their sentences. Your love for them has become strong, steady and safe. But then one day they surprise you by showing you a side of them you’d never seen, and suddenly they make you feel like you did the very first time you realized you were madly in love with them. You’re almost dumbstruck, with a hurricane of emotions circling inside you, and for days afterwards you’re left in a daze. If the partner in question happened to be New York City, this second surge of passion for them would be called Broken City: Wall Street.
Deviced by the imaginative folks at PopUP Theatrics (although “dreamt by” would feel like a more accurate, if esoteric, description) Broken City: Wall Street is a revelatory immersive theatre experience. Participants are asked to meet at a specific spot deep in the financial district, from which they will be whisked away into one of three different storylines each representing past, present or future.
One of them has a type A businesswoman running all over the neighborhood trying to set up a meeting with a potential investor, another has a man who once sat at the top of the world and has now lost it all, and another has a former dancer living in a world of shadows as she struggles to make sense of who she once was. Playwright Peca Stefan has crafted stories filled with rich layers and richer characters, all of whom would be worthy of an entire novel of their own. That Stefan imagines all these characters interacting and converging has the cumulative power of something akin to Angels in America or Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy. Stefan is the kind of writer with the capacity to capture the world, but also to be in endless awe of it.
Stefan’s words as envisioned by directors Ana Margineanu and Tamilla Woodard become a meta experience of New York City, and more often than not they are an exercise in empathy that make us give another look at people who we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. Without recurring to moralism, the experience will make us think twice before shunning the homeless person who asks for a quarter, or the jerk who shoves us as he makes his way down the sidewalk. During the experience one is so immersed in the story being told, that it’s only in its aftermath that one can admire the flawless execution of the experience. Everything is so finely tuned that a single missed cue would make for a fractured experience, and yet everything goes smoothly. Narrators replace each other as you turn around a corner, characters come from behind you to point out details you might have missed, it’s an experience both extremely earthy and supernatural.
For the purpose of maintaining the element of surprise, the actors playing the characters shall remain unnamed because a simple Google search would ruin the excitement of realizing the person who casually passed you by minutes before is actually part of the performance. Needless to say so the ensemble does exemplary work, fully committing to characters that carry around endless pain and sorrow. That they are able to stay true to their parts as passers-by record them on their cell phones or stop and point is admirable and a true feat considering nobody stops for anything in New York City.
Broken City: Wall Street is truly essential theatre. Rarely do words, direction and performance sync with such sublimity, rarely do audiences feel like they’re contributing something to the creative process they’re witnessing (if anything, the experience makes you feel important to the story, for what are tales without people to tell them to?) and the fact that it makes you feel as if you’d just discovered New York City makes it as worthy of a love song as the one it sings to this urban paradise.
