Lucas Hnath: Strange Materializations
In college I read Len Jenkin’s play Dark Ride.
It’s a play written to feel like one of those carnival rides
where you’re swerving through the dark
and where you can never predict what’s going to be around the next corner,
only that you know that what’s coming will be something
surprising or shocking or scary or funny
or all of the above.
It was one of my favorite plays. I wanted to make plays just like it.
I saw on the credit page that it was done at Soho Rep,
and so I put Soho Rep on the list of theatres where I would send my plays.
And then soon after, when I saw my first play at Soho Rep,
I remember thinking before the show started:
Wow, this is the room where Dark Ride happened.
And I remember thinking that it felt like the perfect place for that play—
dark and strangely proportioned, kinda creaky and mysterious…
Over the decades I saw many more plays in Walkerspace—and that moment when you walk through the front door and down that narrow corridor—that alone came to feel like a trip to the carnival where the only predictable thing
is that at the end of the tunnel there’d be something that was either
surprising or shocking or scary or funny
or all of the above.
When I eventually had my own play in this theatre,
I had another moment of, wow, I’m doing my play in the same room where
they did a play that really inspired me to want to make plays—
everything is coming full circle.
And then one day I was googling—what, I don’t remember—but I was googling something that led to something that—long story short—
I saw that Dark Ride premiered at 19 Mercer Street, not 46 Walker.
I thought what is this 19 Mercer Street???
Somehow I’d completely missed the memo that this is not the original Soho Rep theatre space.
So I dunno, maybe I should eulogize both 46 Walker and also, belatedly, 19 Mercer Street. But I don’t know anything about that other space. I did talk to someone the other day though who saw lots of shows at 19 Mercer Street and he said that it was a really great space; I actually got the impression that he liked it even better than this one.
But still, 46 Walker is my Soho Rep theatre.
And as an audience member, I’ve sat facing every possible direction in this space north, east, west, south—a testament to how plays have been able to shift their shapes and reconfigure in this room in all kinds of ways.
But I’ve also been an audience member at Soho Rep shows that have not been in this room—
which means that Soho Rep is a snail, and 46 Walker is just one shell of many shells, and as its most recent, longstanding shell, 46 Walker has let that snail move around and contort itself into all kinds of strange and exciting shapes,
but I’m also certain that there’s a lot that 46 Walker hasn’t let that snail do,
and I’m looking forward to seeing what new surprises it has in store for us that transcend this current shell.
Maybe someday, decades from now, if the snail is still kicking, whatever replaces this space will be misremembered as the original Soho Rep theatre, and something about that feels just right.
I’ll end on an odd little memory that sometimes flashes through my mind when I think about this room.
Sarah Benson and I were in tech for the Disney play.
It was one of those especially quiet parts of tech—not many people were around, no actors—
we were just sitting together, house lights off, looking at some light cues,
and at some point, one of us turned around and noticed that Michael Shannon
was inexplicably sitting right behind us, like, as if he had just materialized out of thin air—
no idea how long he had been there—
And when we turned around to see him, he just said…
(feel free, if you like, to do your best or worst Michael Shannon impersonation)
“You guys in tech?”
(feel free, if you like, to do your best or worst Sarah Benson impersonation)
And Sarah said, “Oh hi, Michael….Yes. We’re tech-ing a play.”
And he said, “Cool.”
And then Sarah asked, maybe in effort to understand why he was there,
“So were you just in the neighborhood?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And then he continued to silently watch us work.
And eventually, just like he appeared,
he disappeared.
And so with that: Thank you, Walkerspace for being a host to strange and sudden materializations
and dematerializations,
and for all manner of dark rides.
Playwright Lucas Hnath premiered his play A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney at Soho Rep.
