The Kraine Theater

Saw excellent performance at this little theater — what a joy to see such a well performed, brilliantly written piece of theater in a tiny, intimate setting. A neighborhood jewel! Highly recommend catching the play — Moonlight after Midnight — before it ends soon. This should be a sell-​out success and extended run! Bravo!

I love that the Kraine is home to so many offbeat/​experimental shows, like Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. But the physical condition could use a lot of improvements. many of the seats have the stuffing ripped out and you’re just sitting on metal rods, and the air conditioner is above the front row so it can be hard to hear over it. I don’t know if this is a revenue or «selling out» type problem.

«Oh my, it is cozy up in here!»
So said my friend as we took our seats in the back row of the first-​floor theater, and truer words were never spoken. The seats were all very close together and at an odd height: it’s not often that my 5’9″ self gets to swing my feet a bit because they don’t touch the floor. All seats were good though – even in the very back we could all see the whole stage, and seems like there’s not a bad seat in the house. Sound system is a bit muddled, but not to the point where we couldn’t hear the actors.
I was also here about a year and a half ago for a production on the 3^rd floor, where it’s really just a small room with slightly gradated floors and folding chairs or pillows – a sound system isn’t needed in that room, since the actors are about 18 inches away!
Small playhouses like this are great though, and it’s a good venue for the off-​off-​Broadway productions that can get really creative. (Maybe throw one more ‘off’ in there for the productions just starting to find their legs.) Definitely worth supporting!

Hard to believe I’ve never gone to this theater before; the other night I went to see «The Skinny» which is basically a current-​events talk show. This segment of the show dealt with the upcoming ⁹⁄₁₁ anniversary and featured my friend Jon playing trombone dressed as Osama Bin Laden. (Here he is dressed as Darth Vader:
)
It is a small, intimate space arranged as an amphitheatre; I didn’t always find it easy to hear, but I’m hard of hearing anyway. For years I’ve been an avid supporter of Off-​off-​off Broadway, and you get a lot of bang for your buck here: only $ 10, which in 1986 dollars translates into something like $ 5. (Conisdering that the beers at the bar upstairs cost easily twice what they cost then, you’re getting a bargain!)

Saw three plays from the Frigid Festival there in the past week. All but one were great and the theater is a small cozy little place… not a bad seat in the house. Staff was always nice and helpful, especially when we were purchasing our passes. One of several excellent little theaters on that block.

BritBits4 was a series of short plays by Mind The Gap Theatre, an Anglo-​American repertory company. Tickets were free from
. The plays were definitely witty and crass, as most British humor is. There were about 20 actors/​actresses on the set and each performed brilliantly.

very cozy little old theater and the long running home to the Neo Futurists on friday and saturday nights (see my review for too much light makes the baby go blind). The KGB bar upstairs will sometimes let you bring bottled beer down to shows and there is definitely an air of so really experimental shit going down here. The good kind though, that gritty rubber meets the road brilliant literary art kind.

This tiny off-​off-​off-​Broadway 100-​seat theater plays mostly experimental, student and other weird and unusual productions. It hosts some of the Fringe Festival plays every year, and that is how I came to be in it.
The stage isn’t raised — it’s just a floor — but the seating slopes, so that you get to see the stage perfectly no matter where you are. The last row is just as good as the first one. The sound is pretty good and relies mostly on acoustics because of the size of the place. I’ve seen actors there performing without any microphones. All this makes for a very personal, intimate experience.