Soho Rep has been playing its imminent departure from the downtown black box fondly known as Walkerspace very cool. Yes, the venue is tiny; it lacks disabled access; it’s got water damage and old plumbing and too little electricity to run the AC during tech rehearsals. And yes, Soho Rep’s leadership team, as well as the folks at Playwrights Horizons—where the Rep is about to bunk up for at least two years—are genuinely excited about their upcoming partnership.
“Are there ways both our organizations can learn from each other?” Caleb Hammons, one of the Rep’s artistic leadership trio, has asked, while Playwrights’ artistic director Adam Greenfield believes the collaboration will reveal “that two theaters working together are much greater than the sum of their parts.” It is exciting, though it never would have happened if Walkerspace’s old landlord hadn’t died and the building hadn’t been acquired by yet another city-devouring developer. Kind of like how the Connelly—one of the most beautiful old theaters in the East Village, with some of the most consistently compelling programming—wouldn’t be shut down and futureless if its landlord, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, hadn’t started screening the scripts a little more closely and decided that these dangerous deviant plays won’t do.
What—in theater and everywhere else—are we to do as the bulldozers of avarice and bigotry roll on? The truth is that we really don’t have a choice .
