On Jan. 18, as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the edgy but venerable New York City company Soho Rep held a funeral/wake in its longtime home, Walkerspace, as it prepared to vacate it for temporary digs at Playwrights Horizons in midtown (where its next production, The Great Privation, opens this week). From among dozens of tributes offered by a wide range of artists during a marathon send-off that stretched from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., we are privileged to share three choice examples.
Louisa Thompson: Getting to Know the Space
The memories for most visitors of 46 Walker are of the complex sensory worlds they would discover and engage—sometimes never understanding the existing limits of the space. Sometimes meeting those limits head on.
I’m going to say space—but we all know I’m talking about a gutted volume that is part of a building and block of mixed-use industrial architecture. The below-Canal-Street address used to mean you had a plastic store, a rubber store, a lighting store, and lots of good discards only a couple blocks away.
The important memory to hold is that nothing about 46 Walker said capital “T” theatre. Open invitation to not care at all if it was recognized physically in the same breath as other institutions around the city.
This felt reinforced by the cruder and grittier interactions 46 Walker required. Unlike in many more precious institutional realities, a designer could screw something right to the wall. An audience member might feel the unevenness of the floor as they entered. An actor might have to climb through the floor.
It’s hard to say goodbye to a place that really felt like it was on a map—attached to a grid—on an island—built on earth with skeletons buried down there somewhere. My memory is full of the transformations layered on top and built right into this reality. I want to share a bit, as a form of memorial, a bit about 46 Walker:
1. The Plans: Two-dimensional scale architectural renderings, showing dimensions, proportions, entrances—they are sort of clinical and express the assumed limits of the space in its reality, even some rules of what can and cannot be blocked or moved. The first plans I saw of 46 Walker were a blueprint, later on a computer screen. Follow the lines. The plans do not show the building in the block, or the block in the city, or the city in the great world. (That would have to live in our bodies.) The plans are focused on the built environment. And for Soho Rep, you learn very quickly that the proportions of this theatre will have to be engaged no matter what (and you learn that perhaps not all the quirks will be in the plans). You use the plans like a map, seeing how a story can move in this space. The narrow entry hall giving way to space with little interruption—or maybe it wants to be interrupted? What is fixed? What can be moved?
The plans of Soho Rep were not like other traditional theatre plans, Where is the stage? Not indicated. Where is offstage? Where do you want it? The plans were like a small game board inviting us to change the rules. Every addition becoming a possible subtraction. Every obstacle an opportunity. Every seat a set of eyes.
2. The Site Visit: Time to meet the director and Soho Rep folks in the space—put your boots on the ground. Walk down the block from the bustle of Canal Street. Follow the numbers on the buildings. Smell and sense the air and textures and the lack of indication that there is a space here for theatre. You are a visitor—a traveller—a guest. It is your time to be an audience to the space—to feel human proportion in relation to all those lines you have studied. To use your body as a ruler. My first site visit I found Daniel Aukin and Alexandra Conley huddled in the basement office looking like squatters; maybe the rent is paid, but the occupation is in the present tense, with some urgency and looks over the shoulder. Together we might sit in the seats, think of the audience: How will they arrive? How will they alter the space? How many can we fit? This makes me think of economy: a sort of unspoken exploration of how much is possible with what you have. This space hides nothing, promises nothing, demands nothing. To sit in the empty 46 Walker is to question scale; a small detail can seem huge. A space where for so long we discuss how many people can fit on a bench—can’t they squeeze? Give up a seat and gain space for the actor. Hide the space, only to find it reveals itself no matter what you do. Black paint erases nothing. Oh, and by the way: Don’t block the paint sink. In this space, with its flexible seating and height, you just wait for the play to find itself, locate itself, and as Daniel would say, “Fight its way out of a corner.”
3. The Model: Everyone loves a space in miniature—at first it all seems possible this way. A bit tamed. And a bit of paper and board can easily be edited. But it is still the space and it still pushes you around and creates the very immediate challenge of where to put the eye of the audience. The model is the space: Put your face right in there and you again are standing right there (without the smell or damp). The model rarely has the entrance, the box office, the bathrooms, the storage under the risers, the dressing rooms, and all the efforts over the years to be organized and safe. Models become a space of play and a way to represent what is to come—to dream—to have a conversation without committing material and labor and resources—proof of concept or proof of commitment—where big questions and ideas explode. Look what we will do; look what will change. The model says, “Don’t forget you are actually working site-specifically at Soho Rep.” Put your stake in the ground; rally energy behind your vision. Let the space know: Here we come.
I share all this as a memory of the time spent building a relationship with 46 Walker. To try to learn something new about it each time. To try to honor the trek of the audience and the challenge of upkeep by truly meeting the space face on—and maybe at times altering it and adding to its history.
Scenic designer Louisa Thompson’s credits at Soho Rep include Samaria, Blasted, and [sic].
Jackie Sibblies Drury: Almost There
Soho Rep.
Walker Street.
These things have been almost the same thing during
My Life In The Theatre.
When I was still in my salad days—
by which I mean the days in New York before Sweet Green and Just Salad,
when a salad was something you had to make yourself with your own bare hands,
or wrangle uphill both ways from Chipotle—
I’d already managed to gain the smallest, grubbiest, bit of status.
Yay for me.
This meant that I could be, sometimes, the one getting
reading, receiving, sometimes tossing,
various résumés/applications/etc.
I started to realize that there was some sort of a difference between Soho Rep.
and a theatre at 56 Walker Steet.
I learned that many shows—self produced shows, shows desperate to come into being, shows desperate to be seen, shows desperate to be valued by the artists who poured their time and attention into those pieces, and hoped that this theatre would hold (and maybe even respect) their hopes and, after the run, that on their résumé, in black and white, that their entire Curriculum Vitae would be buoyed by the mention of the address of a Walker Space theatre at 36 Walker Street.
What a thing. What an absolute honor to be so beloved and respected that to be there-ish was legitimately something to be proud of.
I’ve been almost there a few times, and they’ve been the pride of my career.
I was almost at Soho Rep when I was a member of the Lab, run by Jenny Shwartz and Ken Rus Schmoll. They made me feel so cool and so heard, and so not alone.
I was almost there, when Eric Ting and I were rehearsing for our NYC debut at Soho Rep, at PS122, before it was Performance Space New York, in a theatre that I think now belongs to Mabou Mines. I remember coming back into that space, and seeing an amazing dance, choreographed mostly by Phillip James Brannon and Quincey Tyler Bernstine to Beyonce’s “Love on Top.”
I also remember being almost there during tech in 2012. The wifi at 64 Walker Street has always been shitty. And so, various folks on the crew would walk out to the street to get a signal, and then draw states in red or blue with sharpies on copy paper and tape them to the back wall of the theatre, making an electoral map that Steve Kornacki could NEVER …
Not long after that, we all were almost there when Sandy hit. I wasn’t a part of the flooded basement insanity—hopefully that dark moment is part of a different, better, more rousing eulogy for 2046 Walker Street.
But I remember that Mimi Lien, our set designer, had just started a space with her husband Alec Duffy, and a few of their friends in Brooklyn, called Jack. Alec had just directed a play called Bal, and the walls were covered with tinfoil, as per Mimi’s design. Sarah Benson gave a rousing speech as we met there, while chasing after her then toddler son Manus as he wandered around trying to touch all of the electrical outlets. Part of that speech was that our work was not in vain, that the city would recover, that we would be able to show our work at 49 Welken Street—and be so proud of whatever it was that we’d accomplished.
All of that that was almost here seems a very long time ago now,
but also like it just almost happened.
As I guess it always has been and never was and therefore will always be?
In that way, like the horrible philosophical thing:
that pretentious but helpful to describe thing
that always was and never was
and both at the same time—
with the black cat in the box
or the black box with the cat inside;
Soho Rep is and was Schrödinger’s Space, at 69 Wanker Street,
may she never/forever rest/remain in peace/power.
Jackie Sibblies Drury won the 2019 Pulitzer for Drama for Fairview, which premiered at Soho Rep. She also premiered her play We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 at the theatre and co-chaired its Writer Director Lab.
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.
