Review: The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles at La MaMa
7 / 10
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.
