Inspired by a whole host of counterculture gods — ranging from Alejandro Jodorowsky to Terry Southern — the New York theater troupe, The Amoralists, puts on shows it describes as “an honest expression of the American condition…Rollicking, rebellious, and raw, our work will go home with you…Boom!”
The company’s latest offering, “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” by Derek Ahonen (above), certainly lives up to that mission statement. Even though the three-act, two-hour-and-45-minute play could use a trim here and there, it’s a funny and illuminating look at the struggles of contemporary Manhattan young people who are trying to hold on to their revolutionary ideals.
The play is being presented at Performance Space 122 on First Ave., not too far from the play’s setting — a bombed-out apartment above a vegan restauarant called The Pied Pipers on Ludlow St. The four young people who share the place wonder how long they can retain their radical politics and sexually adventurous lifestyle in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying.
Wyatt (Matthew Pilieci), Billy (James Kautz), Dear (Sarah Lemp) and Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore) call themselves a “tribe” and maintain an open relationship in which they are all sexually available to each other.
The quartet’s 1960s-style idyll is interrupted and then pulled apart by the two other characters in the play — Billy’s oafish younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson) who arrives for a visit and the rich pseudo-bohemian owner of the building Donovan (Malcolm Madera) who suddenly announces he has sold the place.
There is a Cassavetes feel to the long, meandering documentary-style scenes in which laughter and explosions of rage seem to come out of nowhere but are always true to the characters we are observing. The acting could not be much more vividly realistic.
The fly-on-the-wall feeling we get sitting in the very intimate theater is bolstered by set designer Alfred Schatz’s all-too-realistic dump of an apartment and Ricky Lang’s perfect costumes. More than once an audience member in the front row could be seen recoiling from action that looked like it was about to include him.
The first scenes in the play seem to endorse the quartet’s extremely progressive values but then the playwright puts these people to the test when they are brought up short by the realization that their low-cost, highly hedonistic lives are dependent on the whims of the rich Donovan (played with a scary, darkly comic edge by Madera).
The day after I saw the play, I read a story about the controversy over a downtown Manhattan Calvin Klein billboard (below) that depicts a glossier version of the menage in the play. In a joke worthy of Derek Ahonen, some folks are saying the image should be banned because it is ”inappropriate” for the neighborhood.
(“The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” is running through June 28. For more information, visit www.ps122.org)
