‘The Dreary Coast’
CreditByron Smith for The New York Times
How wrong Jean-Paul Sartre was. Hell isn’t other people.
It’s a patch of rocks and scrub just downstream from the Brooklyn Whole Foods.
In “The Dreary Coast,” an immersive theatrical work from Jeff Stark, Hades, king of the underworld, sits enthroned on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in sight of the supermarket parking lot. The Elysian fields? They’re right next to Lowe’s.
This punky, insouciant retelling of the Persephone myth plunks 20 or so theatergoers into a motorized skiff that tools up and down the Gowanus (here subbing for the River Acheron), as the hangdog helmsman, Charon (E. James Ford), and ice queen, Persephone (Ava Eisenson), plot an escape from the abyss. (Considering the rise in housing prices in this corner of Brooklyn, maybe they should stay awhile?) Several dozen spectators watch the action from the shore.
Mr. Stark, an artist specializing in site-specific performance, has used a minuscule budget and a great trove of actorly good will to create a fresh (well, as fresh as the Gowanus gets) and pretty wondrous world. It would seem tough to make much besides cement at this Superfund site. Mr. Stark makes a kind of rough magic.
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The evening begins in a neighborhood bar, where audience members sign a fairly intimidating indemnity waiver. Then we wait, munching fried brussels sprouts and sipping peach bitters, until priestesses clad in shorty kimonos and scary eye makeup arrive, wafting incense and ringing bells. We’re led to a disused space and asked to participate in a silent ritual. At this point, the event has the feel of one of H. P. Lovecraft’s spookier stories.
And yes, old gods are summoned, but they’re not the Chthonic ones. Once the action shifts to the waterway, the Olympian pantheon takes over. We’re informed that we’re a cluster of shades crossing the river from life into death. That’s heavy stuff. But these are some rather flip immortals. They’re as likely to quote Slayer as Virgil and they tell some really bad jokes.
It’s hard to take things too seriously while cruising the Gowanus. Charon, ferrying a reluctant Persephone, asks, “Why can’t you find beauty here?”
“Because it’s a cesspool,” she replies.
Charon steers past a beer can and worse. “I know,” he says.
But there is beauty here. On a chill October evening, the canal’s legendary reek is mild, and the lights from the docks and promontories dance and shimmer in the water. Mr. Stark and his collaborators have towed in barges and decorated sites in between, so that every turn discloses another scene.
Some of the dialogue is draggy, but the story is clearly told, and the costumes and sets are stunners. Even the boat, a rickety craft assembled by the street artist Swoon, is a marvel.
Like Deborah Warner’s “The Angel Project,” the piece of New York immersive art that provides the closest antecedent, “The Dreary Coast” has a way of making the familiar strange. In dim light, with the moon shrouded by fog, it was sometimes hard to tell which elements Mr. Stark had deliberately supplied and which, like that supermarket’s sinister wind turbines, were merely local volunteers.
The subway cars, the smoking chimneys, the garbage trucks with lit antennas, all seemed to work in concert to transform the neighborhood into somewhere much more exotic.
Of course, Persephone didn’t feel that way. “We’re in the middle of a fetid stream, navigating a tide of misery, poison and excrement,” she complained.
Yes. And isn’t it wonderful?