greater > than

Drunken securities traders vaping outside a corporate restaurant harassed Fred (played by Signdance Collective Artistic Director David Bower) a speech-impaired, shelter-insecure hot-shot-turned-truther stuck in the past, whose career and love life collapsed with the World Trade Center in 2001. These authentic jeers realized the character's ostracization from the company he once kept.

As Fred—dressed in tattered attire and carrying a plastic-bag bindle and filthy blanket—crawled across the sidewalk and performed acrobatics on scaffolding, pedestrians sarcastically wished the five spectators luck, assuming—I believe—that we were attempting to talk down a vagrant, thus imbuing us with agency. I felt vulnerable, absorbing their transmitted shame, and the moment became experiential commentary on homelessness.

For playwright Peca Stefan, this personal interaction is essential: “The environment can become part of the story, and we’re looking for that when we create Broken City. The best thing is if the audience member sees everything as performance. So many crazy things happen. Beautiful things. Tragic things. But sometimes people are just too busy or used to it to see that. It’s an exercise in what if we looked at the city with these new eyes.” And the city’s looking back.

This is the third Broken City Stefan has written for PopUP Theatrics Directors Tamilla Woodard and Ana Margineanu. The first two, Lower East Side (2014) and Harlem (2015), examined gentrification. This year’s project explores past, present, and future in three separate yet intersecting tracks. The plays depart from the same origin, follow distinct itineraries, and end with a rotating cast of narrators improvising stories about passersby.

“Time is an obsession for me,” Stefan laughs, “Wall Street is very much in the present. It’s here, now, all the time. But it has such a terrible past. This used to be a street where they would trade slaves. That’s often forgotten about. And we have 9/11 more recently. But it seems like Wall Street is about selling the future. You always have to make speculations.”

On the Future track, as a lone spectator, I followed Valerie (fiercely and sensitively portrayed by Edna Lee Figueroa), a Latina single mother and commodities rainmaker vying for a promotion. I sat with Valerie, consulting her inundated planner, and listened as she repeatedly rescheduled her client meeting and managed her honeymooning boss’s contact attempts. I watched as she projected herself into prospective interactions, notably with a female finance power player inhabited by Signdance Creative Director-Choreographer Isolte Avila, who personifies handicapability. Costumed like a spunky 80s pop star with her forearm crutches wrapped in gold, Avila hoists and manipulates her body around the surrealist landscape with a deftly commanding presence (think: Ruth Porat meets Cyndi Lauper).

Valerie’s anxiety is palpable, echoed in the surrounding footfalls and phone calls. The dream of her daughter winning a Grammy and thanking her is undercut by a nightmare sequence in which the grown girl begs for drug money. Valerie imagines being sexualized by her client and tries to anticipate his racial sensitivities. We all think too many steps ahead and try to mind-read, prepare. I found myself aligned with Valerie’s apprehension and felt eager for her to close. At one point, the narrator joked that I was walking more quickly than he was.

Valerie’s poise and control crumble during the conjured climax, in which she believes the deal has fallen through. She removes her blazer, lies on a sidewalk sculpture, and observes the sky. I lay beside her and looked up for the first time all day. Buildings framed my field of vision with a square of blue clouds in the distance. A calm washed over us, and the denouement was shared: I transformed from voyeur to exhibitionist.

On mapping this track, Stefan muses: “You find so many architectural gems. It’s like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Very narrow streets. Sometimes you don’t see the sun. It’s a really interesting mix that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.” The space is integral to the storytelling. On the Past track, Fred gazes at his reflection in a structure’s mirrored surface, so spectators see his image overlaying their own. This beat forced us to look at ourselves—literally—while witnessing theater, which is unique. We then spied on the memory of Fred’s fiancée through a store window. He later chooses her over reality, exiting a building through a glass partition, leaving the audience inside to watch them embrace and descend subway stairs into his fantasy, transmuting the outside into a dreamscape to be entered.

Stefan is committed to remaining daring, fantastical, and truthful but is able to support himself through his art: “I make my living out of writing. That’s all I do. I’m very lucky. I’m not rich, but I can exist on my writing. Business is business. Art is a different thing. People forget that, without art, business wouldn’t be the same. You can work all day, but it’s the art where you dream, ask the questions, and go forward. A great writer is someone who’s aware of what’s going on emotionally, with your own person and with others around you. It’s an exercise in empathy. Human nature is flawed. Dramatic writing is all about flaws. Look at people. Understand people. Love people.” >

Broken City: Wall Street runs through August 1st. Tickets are available here.