Every so often, certain images may float into your head that feel so strange, so revelatory and so immediate that you may assume, at first, that they must be vestiges of a dream. Then you think, no; what you’re remembering came from something you saw on a stage.
St. Ann’s Warehouse, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary, has provided a bounty of such moments — for me, more than any other New York performing arts institution in this century.
Among those that will probably never stop haunting my imagination: A soldier’s arm crashing into view from the inside of a pool table. An anemic corseted French queen raising her feeble head to be fed from a giant medicine dropper, as if she were a baby bird. A burned-out woman floating like Ophelia in a bathtub, in a revolving house without walls. A pair of inhibited would-be lovers finding themselves suddenly, ecstatically airborne, like a couple in a Chagall painting.
These uncanny visions, by theater artists from both nearby and far away, were summoned to St. Ann’s by Susan Feldman, its tireless leader since its inception in 1980. The latest offering at its vast and versatile pre-Civil War warehouse in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn is a reimagining of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie,” directed by Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”) and starring Michelle Williams. The show also marks the first time the Off Broadway theater will be co-producing, rather than simply presenting.
Presumably, it too will reflect Feldman’s ideal of theater that is close kin to rock ’n’ roll. That means it has “a certain madness,” she says, “an energy that’s over the top,” as well as “a kind of truth that you can’t really put your finger on.”
Rock ’n’ roll of the more customary variety has figured prominently in the history of St. Ann’s, which began life as Arts at St. Ann’s at the 19th-century St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church on Montague Street. So have classical music and all manner of hybrids, from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to Marianne Faithfull, from a puppet opera of “The Barber of Seville” to David Bowie, Lou Reed and Joe Strummer.
But since 2000, after the company moved out of the church, a host of innovative theater troupes have found an ideal canvas in St. Ann’s wide open spaces, starting with the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, whose radical reinvention of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is still held in awe.
I regret having missed that show, called “Dollhouse,” since as both critic and civilian I have rarely been to a St. Ann’s production that did not awaken me to a sense of new possibilities in theater. It’s where I first experienced live the work of artists from Cillian Murphy and Vanessa Kirby to the lyrical stage crafters John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett.
What follows is a list of 10 shows — including two Broadway transfers — that made this inveterate playgoer believe anew, again and again, in theater’s singular power to shock, illuminate and, yes, shake, rattle and roll.
2002
‘To You, the Birdie!’
Eras, worlds, genres, media, technologies and, uh, sports collided with exhilarating impact in the Wooster Group’s take on Racine’s 17th-century tale of illicit passion, “Phèdre.” Under the direction of the troupe’s longtime leader, Elizabeth LeCompte, “Birdie” dis- and reassembled a neoclassical masterpiece, turning forbidden love into a courtly game (of badminton, to be specific) played by an enfeebled aristocracy. Kate Valk gave a supremely witty performance as the seriously sickly queen, whose every phase of digestion was monitored by courtiers. Willem Dafoe was her body-beautiful, iron-pumping husband and Frances McDormand her solicitous nurse. A peerless diagnosis of a terminally ill social order.
2004
‘4:48 Psychosis’
The Royal Court Theater’s harrowing production of the final, fragmented play by the British playwright Sarah Kane (who, at 28, had hanged herself five years earlier) turned what was effectively a meandering list of reasons not to live into what I described as “a work of hypnotic balance, variety and vividness.” James Macdonald directed a cast of three whose images were reflected, distorted and dissolved in an overhead mirror that seemed to obliterate all sense of a coherent, sustainable self. (A decade later, St. Ann’s imported the Polish company TR Warszawa’s very different, equally disturbing version of the same play.)
2007
‘Black Watch’
This is the one in which the bodies of soldiers burst through the red felt surface of a pub’s pool table, reproachful embodiments of inescapable memories of war. Written by Gregory Burke (from interviews with soldiers) and staged with visceral force and poetic delicacy by John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett, this National Theater of Scotland production used long-view and close-up perspectives — and song, dance and video — to create the storied past and haunted present of a Scottish Army regiment that had served in the Iraq War. Its bravura choreographed sequences — including one encapsulating the regiment’s centuries-long history — seemed both to shatter and freeze time.
2008
‘The Walworth Farce’
This gothic domestic comedy-cum-horror story began St. Ann’s long and fruitful association with the sui generis Irish playwright Enda Walsh, whose ear for the self-mythologizing language of his countrymen is as empathic as it is merciless. Directed by Mikel Murfi for the Druid Theater Company, this galloping portrait of domestic dysfunction portrayed a tyrannical father and his two sons acting out an autobiographical passion play in exile in a seedy London flat. (Walsh would hereafter direct his own plays at St. Ann’s, including two dazzling showcases for the electrically kinetic talents of Cillian Murphy: “Misterman,” in 2011, and “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” in 2019.)
2009
‘Brief Encounter’
From the Cornwall, England-based Kneehigh Theater, Emma Rice’s blissed-out reimagining of David Lean and Noël Coward’s 1945 weeper about genteel adulterous longings blurred the lines between flesh and celluloid. In this version, the godlike powers of theater allowed the show’s leading lovers to give physical, acrobatic life to repressed desires as they literally danced on air and swung from a chandelier. The show would go on to acclaim (and two Tony nominations) on Broadway in 2010.
2012
‘Mies Julie’
This genuinely shocking South African import relocated “Miss Julie,” August Strindberg’s savage chamber play about class and sexual warfare, to a post-apartheid plantation. A fatal encounter between a young white upper-class woman and her father’s Black servant becomes a lens through which a whole nation is tried and found guilty. I wrote that while this smoldering, blood-steeped show, created by Yael Farber, generated “more erotic heat” than any in town, “This is a fire that chills as it destroys.”
2013
‘Julius Caesar’
The first of three inspired Shakespeare productions by Phyllida Lloyd for London’s Donmar Warehouse that were cast entirely with women (it would be followed by “Henry IV” and “The Tempest”) and re-envisioned with claustrophobic intensity as dramatic workshops in a women’s prison. The fact of actresses — who included Harriet Walter and Cush Jumbo — playing prisoners playing noble Romans actually raised the work’s testosterone quotient, underscoring the hollowness of macho posturing and magniloquence.
2016
‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
The iconoclastic Australian director Benedict Andrews brought a harsh and illuminating sociological distance to Tennessee Williams’s titanic drama by stripping it of its poetry. This “Streetcar” was set in the present day, with Gillian Anderson as a Blanche in perpetual fight-or-flight mode who might have stepped out of a “Real Housewives of New Orleans” series. Her clash with her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley (Ben Foster), registered as a ruthless Darwinian struggle, enacted in a revolving house without walls. The cast also included a terrific Vanessa Kirby as Stella, Blanche’s sister, and a natural-born survivor.
2018
‘The Jungle’
Among the most invigoratingly topical plays to be staged that season, this production out of London’s Young Vic Theater recreated a migrant encampment in Calais, France, where the young dramatists Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson had spent time. St. Ann’s was transformed into the camp itself, and audiences shared space (and even food) with the international cast, three of whom almost didn’t make it to Brooklyn because they were from Muslim countries whose citizens were, at the time, denied entry into the United States. Its dramatis personae included Britons of good intentions and limited perception. A work of immersive empathy, urgency and anguish that asks what home means in a world in roiling flux.
2018
‘Oklahoma!’
Daniel Fish’s thrilling, convention-busting revival elicited the darkest shadows within “the bright golden haze” of the ultimate Golden Age musical. Not an obvious recipe for mainstream success, yet when the show moved to Broadway the next year, it picked up Tonys for the season’s best revival and for best supporting actress for Ali Stroker’s portrayal of Ado Annie. Without changing the original text or lyrics, this excavation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s paradigmatic show found the violence — social, political and erotic — that always throbbed within the sunniness. Like so much of what happens at St. Ann’s, it made you look with virgin eyes at something you thought you knew all too well.
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