Remote New York: Theater review by Helen Shaw
The best part of Remote New York, the guided walk by the German group Rimini Protokoll, is getting to it early. The location, specified only after your ticket has been purchased, is somewhere in Green-Wood Cemetery and, if you're lucky, you'll get the start time wrong and wind up walking around the graves in the fog. On Saturday, the iced-over pond was smoking slightly in the rain; foghorns were crying somewhere off Red Hook. But when the piece itself begins and your headphones go on, stillness is replaced by a stream of fatuous nonsense. There were moments in the trip—which includes a trundle into Manhattan and a fast amble up to NYU—when I would give a forlorn hoot to myself, missing those foghorns so completely.
The method is familiar: Audience members are given headphones and the disembodied voice tells us where to go and what to look at. Our guide is a computer-generated Siri substitute, a mechanical voice with pretensions of grandeur. She tries to gin up the machine-versus-man tension by steering us over to a burial plot and having us meditate on our impending deaths, all while preening about her own immortality…and forgetting we have her volume control. She bangs on about group dynamics (“You are a group that does not want to be together; I will call you a horde”) and peer pressure. She tries to speed up our walking by playing jaunty music, and she asks us to look at a slice of street as though it were an opera set teeming with extras.
Most of the actual sentences programmed for her by the German performance collective are, unfortunately, idiotic. “Houses are like tombs for the living,” the voice tells us, her machine voice devoid of irony. Oh yeah? Well, pants are like sleeves for your legs. Wrestle with that, sister. Her most impressive feat is seeming to know when traffic lights have just changed, so she can hustle us across, although there may be a clue to her omniscience in the strenuously innocent-seeming young people in the group.
Rimini Protokoll has long been the groundbreaker in nonactor performances, as in, for instance, Call Cutta in a Box, in which a single audience member interacted with a call-center employee nations away. But the trouble with such innovation is how quickly it ages. At its root, the experience must have content; it can't simply be a gee-whiz technological feat, nor can it merely point to ideas instead of having them. There are a few strong moments in Remote New York— being connected through headsets means our group can play pranks on an unsuspecting subway car, and coming upon an unlocked door in this city can seem almost magical. There's even a revelation in store, though it might not be the one the show has planned. By the end, we sit in a building high up, the voice trying to get us to see the people below like ants. Finally, I had a breakthrough. How happy people down there without headphones seemed! And lo, I was eager to be among them.—Helen Shaw
Location somewhere in Green-Wood Cemetery (see Off-Off Broadway). By Rimini Protokoll. Running time: 2hrs 15mins. No intermission.