The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles Off-Broadway Reviews

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 t...

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.

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 s...

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.

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 lo...

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.