Ben
Brantley

May 22, 2015

There’s no hiding in the dark this time, and none of the usual safety in numbers. It’s just you and her — or him — eyeball to eyeball, in a closed, red space the size of a confessional. If you blush or yawn or wipe tears from your eyes, she sees it; that means, of course, that she feels it, too. The responsibilities of being an audience rarely weigh as heavily as they do in “I’m Not the Stranger You Think I Am,” the series of short (roughly five-minute) plays that opened this week at Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan. The self-contained, tiny (4 feet by 8 feet), mobile structure in which these solo dramas take place resembles a confessional in more ways than one. As this mini-theater has been created, by the inspired designer Christine Jones and the architectural firm Lot-ek, you find yourself in immediate proximity to someone who has every intention of confiding in you. He or she materializes when a screen slides away, revealing a person seated, as you are, and as close as the image in your bathroom mirror. There may be a few seconds of silence, but then this person starts talking with the urgency of someone who really, really needs you to understand. Under the circumstances, you have no choice but to try to honor the request.