The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles
Written and directed by Paul Zimet
66 East 4th Street, Manhattan, NYC
April 24-May 10, 2026
 |
| The cast of The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
In the preface to his book
The Clock Mirage (Yale University Press, 2020, Kindle ed.), Joseph Mazur describes time as "partly mathematical, partly conceptual, and significantly imaginary" (loc. 90). He adds that time, rather than something independent and absolute, "is often personal" and has "to do with our cells and brains, things that update memories to tell our bodies that we are in the rhythms and beats of being alive" (loc. 105, 148). Time as Mazur characterizes it is integral to the rhythms and ruminations of
The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles, written and directed by Talking Band co-founder and Artistic Director
Paul Zimet. The play is partly inspired by Thomas Mann's 1924 novel
The Magic Mountain, in which, during the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I, a young man spends much longer than intended in a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps, while, as Zimet writes in a program note, "[t]he reader’s sense of time expands and shrinks in the same way that it does for" the protagonist.
The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles stretches, collapses, and fragments time as, over the course of a year, multiple generations of family and neighbors encounter each other around a dining table amidst the interstices of memory and mortality, politics and play, aging and potentiality.
 |
| L to R: Jack Wetherall, Tina Shepard, Amara Granderson, Patrick Dunning, and Ellen Maddow. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
The production begins with young couple Norm (
Patrick Dunning) and Jenny (
Amara Granderson) and Norm's parents Marc (
Jack Wetherall) and Clara (
Ellen Maddow) setting that dining table, which sits in front of a window looking out onto a wooded area. (The window view is a projection that changes the season or location, overlays other images on the landscape, and, in one creatively staged scene, plays out one of Marc's significant memories with onstage Marc taking up his half of a conversation). This quartet is joined after a time by their friend Oona (Talking Band co-founder
Tina Shepard), and as this table setting proceeds, at certain points, time seems to slow, movements become more stylized, or everyone freezes; the table is unset, and the sequence plays out again. All of this action unfolds without dialogue and in close connection with music. The play's music, composed by Talking Band founding member Ellen Maddow (a recipient, like Zimet and Shepard, of an OBIE Lifetime Achievement Award), features prominently throughout, which is fitting given music's relation, like time's, to bodily rhythms, mathematics, and imagination. As much as time is a way of marking "the rhythms and beats of being alive," music is a form of marking time.
 |
| Jack Wetherall and Delaney Feener. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
When the characters first speak, they immediately introduce ideas of time, aging, and perception, commenting on Norm and Jenny's baby, Abby, and her future, which prompts Jenny to recall how being in her own crib as a child and looking through the slats made her realize that "just by moving my eyes, I could change the way things look" (notably, Marc polishes his glasses a lot in that opening scene). Jenny's memory spurs others to childhood reminiscences as well, while new days bring new topics of conversation, such as when friend and neighbor Rita (Lizzie Olesker), wife to Rick (Steven Rattazzi), asks if Norm and Jenny are "gloomy" about the world and its future, which elicits conversation not only about the present and future political situation in the United States but also about past activism on Rick and Rita's part. Rita and Rick are older than Jenny and Norm but younger than Clara, Marc, and Oona, presenting–along with the unseen Abby and Rick and Rita's daughter Rose, also unseen, who is old enough to be pregnant and engaged by the end of the play–multiple generations and life stages at once. Mazur writes of time as "marking of the human path through its own presence" (3) and at multiple points, Marc thinks back to an earlier stage in his life, a shipboard Atlantic crossing where he met Anne (Delaney Feener), an "early lover," to use Clara's words.
 |
| L to R: Amara Granderson, Patrick Dunning, and Tina Shepard. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
This memory of Anne is linked to Marc's relationship to
The Magic Mountain, which he read on board the ship, and Marc periodically imagines, or maybe remembers himself into, dinners in the novel's sanatorium. While the sanatorium is a place outside of time in a way (people are not expected to leave, and when they do, it is generally as corpses removed under the cover of night), or, as a fictional place, in more than one way, there also a hint of temporal repetition: Marc (the only character who remains in modern dress in these scenes) takes an interest in the alluring Clavdia, played by Feener, while soldier Joaquim, played by Dunning, has eyes for the giggly Maryusa, played by Granderson. The cast is outstanding in both halves of this temporal division, and these doublings increase the sense of time as collapsing in on itself (as well as spotlighting
Olivera Gajic's fantastic costume design) as the sanatorium acts as a sort of counterpoint to Marc and Clara's contemporary home, which is itself framed by logging going on in the forest outside (leaving aside what happens with one of the loggers, the cutting down of the trees, their potential replacement, even their recording of time and age in their rings, which is to say, in their cells, all brings us back again to the play's central concerns). Anne talks about moments of opportunity, of possibility, and if Marc's time with her was one such moment, the end of the play, it transpires, brings Marc and Clara to another–a choice of whether to settle into a closing chapter or, to quote Anne quoting Ezra Pound, to "Make It New!" Engrossing and experimental,
The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles certainly does that.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
Comments
Post a Comment