I Wish To Go To the Festival: Capsule at (Virtual) Under the Radar

I love a theatre festival.

My favorite part of my entire undergraduate experience, bar none, was Playground, a week when all of our official School of Drama courses and rehearsals were cancelled, and all students across years and disciplines were unleashed to create to our artsy fartsy theatre student heart’s contents. It was magical.

In New York City, it’s Playground all the time, but never so much as in January, when theaters and arts organizations all over the city host a series of new work/avant garde/experimentally oriented festivals. If you’re someone in the know (or someone involved in programming at an arts organization) you might spend the whole month running between venues, from traditional prosceniums to basement bars, trying to find the best of the best, newest of new, boldest of bold.

This year, festival season is, obviously, online, which in some ways works. It retains the scrappy and experimental nature, arguably more so than ever, with traditionally theatre artists being forced outside of their comfort zone and into the digital realm. It also makes the festival shows more accessible, as most online experiences are. You don’t have to be in the know, on a list, or have the time and/or ability to run around the city to catch the best shows of the season.

Last night, I began my festival season from my couch with The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. I selected Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall’s Capsule, for basically no reason. I intend to watch more festival picks, this was just the one I chose last night.

In Capsule, White and Kendall explore all the events of the past year through original text and music. Between zoom calls and segments filmed in person, the collaborators explore their pandemic lives as well as the reckoning around racial justice (White is a Black woman and Kendall is a white man) through intimate conversations as well as song.

Okay we’re gonna derail for a second and I’m gonna be completely honest with you about how I experienced the first few minutes of Capsule. As I was looking at these two actors, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this guy is attractive in the same way all the guys in my BFA program were attractive.’ This thought was followed by the thought, ‘I’ve had this thought before.’ And because I am me and I cannot let things go, this lead to me pausing the show, going through my email to find the name of a random play I went to an industry reading for in February 2020 (lol) to see if he was in it or if he just has a doppelgänger and/or I can’t tell conventionally attractive yet vaguely hipster-ish white men apart. Alas, it WAS him!

So after that mystery was solved, I tuned back into the rest of show. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I did have to take another break because I, once again, did not turn my phone off, and was made aware by one of my friends that there are rumors going around that Armie Hammer might be a cannibal, so I had to unpack that.

Barring the moments where I was stalking the cast or researching celebrity cannibalism, there were a few genuinely moving moments in this… theatre piece? Short film? Idk, man.

Through out the piece (let’s call it that for now), White and Kendall move between more under-produced, intimate, dialogue driven moments to more highly-produced and edited songs. I personally preferred the dialogue and found their discussions of topics including how their grandmothers were handling the pandemic and having mental illness through all of this really touching and because they were so deeply personal they also avoided cliche. While a lot of the music was really beautiful, I enjoyed the song sequences less, mostly because they were very strobe-y. I don’t know if that’s a word! Anyway, White has a beautiful voice, and when she was given moments to really shine and demonstrate her abilities as a singer I was really engaged. I’ve even looked up both of them on Spotify and am disappointed to not find their music available to me on demand. But the visuals felt very theatrical to me in a way that both didn’t translate on screen and genuinely hurt my eyes. The Public’s website, where Capsule is available to stream for free through the 17th, doesn’t have a warning about strobe effects, but I would not recommend watching this if you’re sensitive to flashing lights. However, you might still enjoy listening to it like a radio play.

I think that’s all I have to say for now. I’m excited to see how other artists’ are able to adapt to the online festival space. I was going to watch more UTR performances last night/today, but things have been crazy…. you know, I don’t owe you an explanation. This is my website! Nobody is reading this. I’m very tired.