Review Roundup: Paul Zimet's THE DOOR SLAMS, A GLASS TREMBLES

La MaMa in association with Talking Band is now presenting the world premiere of The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles written and directed by Paul Zimet with music by Ellen Maddow. A couple moves from the city to a rural home, hoping for respite from the political turmoil gripping the country. In the spirit of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, time elongates, compresses, and layers events past, present and imagined, until a fatal accident wrenches everyone into the present.

The play unfolds over the course of a year as family and friends gather for dinners that repeat, fragment, and morph into dinners in a sanatorium in the Alps. The play collapses past and present. The extraordinary manifests within the mundane, humor sits alongside unease; intimate confessions give way to philosophical musings, and private lives echo the noise of the public arena. With its finely calibrated balance of wit, lyricism, and political awareness, The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles becomes a meditation on time, responsibility, and the fragile moments of connection that persist even as reality increasingly feels like chaos.

The cast includes founding company members, Ellen Maddow and Tina Shepard; longtime collaborators, Jack Wetherall, Steven Rattazzi and Lizzie Olesker; Amara Granderson, seen last year in Talking Band's Triplicity; and Patrick Dunning, Delaney Feener, and Jesse B. Koehler, making their debut performances with the company. 

Let's see what the critics had to say about the new play...

Jay Weisberg, Culture Catch: The fact is that the play’s action and dialogue support a bigger purpose, and just narrating them, scene-by-scene, cannot convey the entrancing mood and movement of the play — and indeed, such telling might make it all seem inconsequential. But the truth is that the audience is getting more than just words and action: as staged, through these fine performances, we are transported toward something profound. We come, movingly, face-to-face with loss and endings--via a range of departures. But there’s also something more: the hints of new possibilities for us all, a perfume of life whose vivid aroma keeps our hearts open — as well as open to quest, gamble, and adventure.

Tony Marinelli, TheaterScene.net: To call this production engrossing would be accurate but insufficient. It is, more precisely, a work that recalibrates one’s sense of duration, leaving the audience suspended in its wake, attuned to the subtle rhythms of existence. In an era that so often mistakes speed for vitality, Zimet and his collaborators offer a counterproposal: that to truly experience time, one must be willing to let it tremble, to let it break, and, occasionally, to let it begin again.

Loren Noveck, Exeunt: A meditation on the experience of time inspired loosely by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Talking Band’s new piece, The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles has a bit of the aura of durational performance art. It’s only a little more than an hour long, but it still stretches and condenses time with curious effect: languid, meditative moments; skips and repetitions; whorls and loops. It is a scripted play (by Paul Zimet, who also directs)—as well as being choreographed and scored with precision (by Flannery Gregg and Ellen Maddow respectively)—but the content of it is less important, even less interesting, than the experiencing of it. The play’s action is set almost outside of time: a little pocket universe–“a month in the country”–that is sometimes the dining room of a home in a rural town in the present day and sometimes the dining room of the Berghof Sanatorium before World War I.

Average Rating: 83.3%