The Under the Radar festival will feature works from 11 countries, including the Belarus Free Theater’s “Being Harold Pinter.”
The problem with being a cutting-edge theater festival is that it gets harder and harder to keep things sharp.
That’s the challenge faced by Under the Radar, presented each year by the Public Theater. This year’s edition, the seventh — beginning tonight and running through Jan. 16 — features 19 new shows from the United States and 10 other countries, including Chile, Italy, Belgium and Mali.
Producer Mark Russell has been at the festival’s helm since the beginning. This year, he and an associate winnowed down the lineup from some 300 possibilities, a number he says seems to get larger every year.
“It’s always an adventure trying to put this thing on,” Russell says. “For instance, how could I have known that I would be trying to sneak people out of an almost Soviet country?”
He’s referring to the Belarus Free Theater, which returns to the festival this year with “Being Harold Pinter,“ which interweaves transcripts from interviews with Belarussian political prisoners and excerpts from the playwright’s political writings. The troupe almost didn’t make it here, and its efforts to sneak out of the Eastern European country pursued by government agents is the stuff of an espionage novel.
Russell fully expects there’ll be spies in the audience when the show plays at La MaMa.
“We can’t keep them away,” he laughs. “So we’ll take their $20.”
Among the other shows he’s excited about are “Dutch A/V,“ a multimedia collaboration between musician Reggie Watts and playwright Tommy Smith that explores Amsterdam’s cities, and “Ameriville,“ by the New York-based company UNIVERSES, about our post-Katrina nation.
Other picks include “Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good),“ for which the UK/Germany-based Gob Squad reconstructs Andy Warhol’s film “Kitchen,” and “Phobophilia,“ a piece by Quebec’s 2boys.tv, in which all 24 theatergoers are blindfolded and led to a secret location to witness an interrogation.
“A lot of artists are looking to take the audience out of their comfort zone,” Russell explains. “Sometimes that requires taking a small group of them down a hallway and into a dark room.”
One piece doesn’t even require a stage: “Watch Me Work” has the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (“Topdog/Underdog”) peck out a new piece on a manual typewriter in The Public’s lobby, followed by a Q&A session.
“This is a festival that’s all about artistic risk,” Russell says. “We ask the audience to take a risk, too. But all of the risks have integrity to them. We will not waste your time.”
Or money. Tickets for most shows — which play out at The Public, La MaMa, Dixon Place, HERE, the Robert Moss Theatre and Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — are $15; “Watch Me Work” is free.
For details, visit publictheater.org or call 212-967-7555.