First, however, a failure: Cop-Out, a short, surreal play that flopped spectacularly.
If "A Chorus Line" is a good idea almost perfectly realized, Tina Howe's surreal play "Birth and After Birth" (in revival at the Atlantic Theatre Company, under the direction of Christian Parker) is a good idea almost entirely botched.
This brief, almost surreal play tracks a talented and very dark-skinned woman's decline into self-destructive madness, a result of her inability to believe that any man could love a woman so black.
Away from the gold, the designers at Studio Swine make a strikingly attractive, Art Deco-inspired dressing-table suite decorated with human hair embedded in resin, in a surreal play on the worldwide trade in hair extensions.The exhibition, a collaboration with the Craft Council, grew out of research done by two curators, Jana Scholze and Leanne Wierzba.
Jarman put a lot of effort into his design course, outlining a surreal play, The Billboard Promised Land (a mashup of The Wizard of Oz and culture shock from his brief escape to the US), and producing the required portfolios of stage projects.
In his first year he played the robot in Karel and Joseph Capek's surreal play, RUR, at the People's Palace, Stepney, east London, and, more significantly, toured the regions for a few weeks in a tour of a Herbert Farjeon revue, Nine Sharp.
In Shawn's surreal play from 2009, "Grasses of a Thousand Colors," also directed by Gregory at the Public (the second and final production of the Wallace Shawn Andre Gregory Project, co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience, beginning previews Oct. 7), a memoirist and scientist named Ben, played by Shawn himself, welcomes the audience with a smile.
A different kind of threat fuels the determinedly surreal play by Sibyl Kempson being staged at EMP Collective: Sentient spuds.
The feminist intentions are obvious, and the work is best when it verges on the surreal, playing with double exposures.
Dinner scenes are surreal plays with the dialogue clipped out, so it's two people mostly making odd faces at one another.
Episode by episode, the surreal plays footsies with the relatable black Justin Biebers, polite rip and runs and Teddy Perkins creepin people steady Jacko'ing.
