Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – A chill from across the pond hits The Shed: Alexander Zeldin’s disorienting OTHER PLACE and Simon Stephens’ virtual ARK

• By drediman
• February 12, 2026
• No Comments

Over at The Shed at Hudson Yards, you’ll find a pair of new works by two celebrated British playwrights that bring a chill from across the pond to our shores. Read on for my thoughts on these disorienting plays — one technologically jarring, the other an emotional ticking bomb — that had me bracing for the stark realities of the world waiting for me just outside the so-called shed.

THE OTHER PLACE
The Shed
Through March 1

On an absolutely arctic night, I ventured out to The Shed to catch the British import The Other Place (RECOMMENDED), Alexander Zeldin’s compact and emotionally fraught contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Recast as an intimate contemporary family drama, the play tells the story of two sisters who reunite for the ash-scattering ceremony on their deceased father. When one of the sisters demands that their father’s ashes be kept in the home in which their uncle is attempting to embark on a fresh start for his own family, dramatic fireworks ensue, resulting in the spilling of family secrets and the disintegration of the illusions that have kept the family tenuously intact. The acting throughout by the six-person cast is top-notch; each exquisitely maintains the tension until turn of events lead to a climactic — and cathartic — immolation. A special shout out must go to sound designer Josh Anio Grigg (and composer Yannis Philippakis), whose subtle and incisively hyper-naturalistic design exquisitely heightens the drama and really got under my skin. Zeldin’s chilly work makes for a fascinating companion experience to Robert Icke’s Oedipus, another play that attempts — rather successfully — to reframe Greek tragedy within a modern context, in the process altering the underlying work’s DNA. Even if Zeldin’s world building isn’t quite as captivating and fleshed out as it is in Icke’s adaptation, I was nonetheless viscerally affected by this familial portrait of deep-seated pain, grief, and guilt.

AN ARK
The Shed
Through March 1

Also at The Shed, you’ll also find the genre-defying journey that is An Ark (RECOMMENDED), Simon Stephens’ soulful and generously acted mixed media play about the gamut of human life — encompassing childhood, first love, the process of dying, etc. — vis-à-vis the passage of time, “starring” the quartet of Ian McKellan, Golda Rosheuvel, Rosie Sheehy, and Arinzé Kene. You see, these actors don’t actually perform live and in person. Instead, their performances have been digitally captured and are being presented via virtual reality headsets that gives the illusion of them enacting the play merely inches in front of audiences. As directed by Sarah Frankcom, this ironically gives the experience a level of immersion — and dare I say, humanity — that is nearly impossible to logistically achieve by traditional theatrical means. Indeed, it’s as if these actors are putting on a play for you — and only you. One of England’s premiere playwrights, Stephens (perhaps best known for penning the Tony-winning stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is an intellectually curious artist who takes audiences to fascinating new realms of thought. It’s therefore unsurprising that An Ark — despite its bullet point depiction of the fabric of the human experience — is also a stimulating mediation on the nature of time itself, both in relation to generations of human lives, as well as within the context of the theatrical experiment at hand (i.e., the idea of performance literally occurring across time and space).