I saw a great show at Ars Nova last night. Now Circa Then is a play that takes place at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and concerns the two actors (or the people inhabiting the roles of two 19th century Prussian immigrants in a reenactment) who engage in a relationship both outside and in their stage lives. The play is simple in it’s structure and conceit, yet manages to cleverly illuminate the joys and perils of our existence. It is funny, sad, tender and sweet; a play within a play that leaves us searching for our own plot as we leave the theater.
I love that as an audience, we enter a theater expecting and yearning to be deliberately deceived by the actors so that we might be enlightened to a deeper truth of our reality!