‘Ulysses,’ ‘Watch Me Walk’ and Other Festival Shows Revisit the Past

Several avant-garde festival productions in New York this January turn backward, revisiting personal archives and modernist texts, the critic Helen Shaw reports. Highlights include Anne Gridley’s solo “Watch Me Walk” at Playwrights Horizons (a Soho Rep commission and Under the Radar offering, running through Feb.

15), Elevator Repair Service’s retelling of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at the Public Theater (running through March 1), and the Goat Exchange’s “Time Passes” at the Exponential Festival (playing through Saturday). Shaw describes “Watch Me Walk,” directed by Eric Ting, as an often comic, sometimes messy solo that draws on Gridley’s long association with Nature Theater of Oklahoma and on archival material such as a recorded phone call between Gridley’s mother and Pavol Liska from the company’s work on “No Dice.” Gridley, who discovered she inherited hereditary spastic paraplegia late in life and now requires mobility aids, frames the piece as part cabaret about disability and part account of familial loss, with Physiology 101 interludes and moments of fall-and-rise physicality.

The festivals also reached into midcentury literature. Shaw notes JoAnne Akalaitis’s meditative staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play “All That Fall” for Mabou Mines and Sister Sylvester’s participatory installation “Drinking Brecht” at Onassis ONX, which walks participants through assembling cocktails mixed, the review says, with DNA from one of Bertolt Brecht’s long-dead collaborators.

anne gridley, watch me walk, watch me walk review, playwrights horizons, soho rep commission, under the radar, elevator repair service, ulysses retelling, public theater, goat exchange, time passes, exponential festival, hereditary spastic paraplegia, mobility aids, nature theater of oklahoma, no dice, eric ting, joanne akalaitis, all that fall, samuel beckett, mabou mines, sister sylvester, drinking brecht, onassis onx, bertolt brecht, archival material, physiology 101 interludes, familial loss, cabaret about disability, james joyce