The Atmosphere of Memory
Opening Night: October 30, 2011
Closing: November 13, 2011
Theater: Bank Street Theatre
"The Atmosphere of Memory" opens LAByrinth’s 2011/12 Season and tells the story of playwright Jon Stone, who has recently found the courage to write his masterpiece: a play about his upbringing. But problems arise when his actual mother is cast to play his mother on stage and his estranged father remembers the family history differently. Jon is forced to rewrite not only his play, but his past as well. With twists hilarious and heartbreaking, playwright Katz (Philip Roth in Khartoum, Freak) turns Williams and O’Neill on their heads by imagining a world where the boundaries between life / art, and fact /fiction, are as blurry as The Atmosphere of Memory itself.
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October 30, 2011
A playwright battles his demons not on the therapist’s couch but on the page and the stage in “The Atmosphere of Memory,” a new play by David Bar Katz at the Bank Street Theater. The odds are definitely stacked in favor of the demons, I’m afraid, when we learn that the lead role in the writer’s memory play is being portrayed by his own mother, a well-known actress and twinkly-eyed narcissist, and the rehearsals are regularly invaded by his estranged father, who belittles and mocks the enterprise with lip-smacking viciousness.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2011
Early in David Bar Katz’s "The Atmosphere of Memory," which features a group of actors rehearsing an autobiographical play, there is a scene in which a cast member complains to the playwright that the script they have all been working on is shallow and confused, a self-indulgent muddle redeemed only by the acting and the direction. hat character could have been writing my review of "Atmosphere" itself, except the liming and staging can’t rescue this disaster.
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October 31, 2011
The tiny Bank Street Theatre is a freakishly appropriate place to watch the excellent new dark comedy “The Atmosphere of Memory.” There’s no stage to speak of; if you’re sitting in the first row, nearly brushing against actors, you might as well be in the show. This couldn’t be any more perfect for David Bar Katz’s new piece, which is all about the uncomfortable, often exploitative merging of life and art.
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October 30, 2011
The classic artist’s axiom "Write what you know" is only effective when you actually know something. For the central figure in — and audiences at — David Bar Katz’s The Atmosphere of Memory, which just opened at the Bank Street Theatre in a LAByrinth Theater Company production, things are considerably more problematic when the baseline of self-awareness is absent.
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October 31, 2011
To the Lyons, the Wyeths, the Antonescus, and the scores of ofher unhappy families now populating New York’s many stages, we can add the Stones, the dysfunctional clan at the heart of David Bar-Katz’s simultaneously overstuffed and underwhelming new play, The Atmosphere of Memory, being presented by the Labyrinth Theatre Company at the Bank Street Theatre.
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