The Tenant

Woodshed Collective at the West-Park Presbyterian Church, New York

woodshedcollective.com

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Site-specific, peripatetic theater is enjoying a mini-boom” in New York City, said David Sheward in Backstage. It started with Sleep No More, which stages a Macbeth-like drama on five floors of a Chelsea hotel and feels like a “dream-like smash-up between Hitchcock and Shakespeare.” Now there’s The Tenant, adapted by six playwrights from a 1964 French novella and mounted in a five-floor Upper West Side church. While the main story line concerns Trelkovsky, “a pathetic Everyman type” who moves into a new Paris apartment after the previous tenant commits suicide, there are seven other plotlines that an audience member can choose to follow. Unfortunately, “the fragmentary nature of the enterprise makes comprehension nearly impossible.”

Actually, that sense of disorientation enhances the mood, said Andy Propst in TheaterMania​.com. “What impresses most about the production is how astutely the company builds the intensity and suspense” as Trelkovsky comes to believe that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into the previous tenant. Following Michael Crane’s “marvelously intense performance” as Trelkovsky for “at least a good portion of the piece” is “highly recommended.” But the tangential stories also have merit; everyone in the 23-member company makes even “glimpses” of the plot thread intriguing.

Such a site-specific production, however, makes it “important to get the details right,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. With The Tenant, “the execution is way too careless.” This is supposed to be an apartment building in 1960s Paris, yet there’s a 1978 Rolling Stones album in one room and a Vogue cover sloppily pasted onto a copy of New York magazine in another. The video projections, which are supposed to help guide the journey, contain “cutesy mangled French” that looks like it was generated by Google Translate. All of this “breaks the immersive mood, which is key to a conceptual show.” There’s no price for admission to The Tenant, but “that may be too high a price” for an experience that utterly fails to engage.