vip in the city

Adult reading

Attended a reading of Christina Masciotti’s new work, Adult, as part of The New Group/New Works readings series. Masciotti’s previous works include 2004’s Hello School and The Collection, which had its run at chashama in Fall 2005.

Adult is a spare, two-character drama about the struggles of becoming an adult, and how it’s never too late to undertake the process. Stanley, a working class gun shop owner, is resigned to a solitary, aimless existence in his depressed Pennsylvania town. His life changes almost overnight when his formerly estranged daughter Tara decides to leave college to stay with him for a while. New York singer/songwriter Jimmie James (who wrote the songs for last year’s Everythings Turning into Beautiful ) gave a sensitive rendition of a man navigating the sometimes fraught relationships between fathers and daughters. NYU student Halley Wegryn Gross, who appeared with Ethan Hawke, Parker Posey, Bobby Cannavale, and Wallace Shawn in HurlyBurly in 2005, read the role of daughter Tara. The performances were directed by Ian Morgan, Associate Artistic Director of The New Group.

The event took place at the 4th floor studio theatre of Theatre Row, on 42nd Street between Ninth and Dyer Avenues, the last of which exists primarily to direct traffic and exhaust to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. Theatre Row — actually a five-theatre complex — premiered on the block in the 1970s when this stretch of 42nd street was a strictly low-rent neighborhood, rife with prostitutes, porn shops, massage parlors, and tenements. Playwrights Horizons moved to the area, west of the traditional theater district, in 1975, where it was instrumental in the revitalization of Theatre Row. Several more smaller theatres followed, opened by the state-sponsored 42nd Street Development Corporation to renew this desolate block.

The theatres are protected by a land-use covenant, but they were gutted and entirely rebuilt in a 2000 project that included new revenue-producing residential towers, a new Playwrights Horizons space, the Little Shubert, and a handful of smaller theatres, studios and rehearsal rooms.