For one week, playwright and director Richard Maxwell will make theater in the Museum, reframing rehearsal as an open and publicly presented activity. When the Museum is open to the public, Maxwell and his theater company, New York City Players, will work on a new original play, proceeding with no intent beyond a commitment to the specificity of the circumstances. Taking here as basic tenets the open gallery, the text, the movements of his actors, and the audience gathering in a room, Maxwell’s practice defines and radically reconfigures the boundaries of theater. His work’s deep concern for finding a complex and rigorously designed reality has led to eschewing both avant-garde clichés and the entrenched theatrical techniques of naturalism.
Richard Maxwell is in residence on the Museum’s fourth floor April 25 through 29.