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November 19, 2010
Yards drama will delight Ratner, appall opponents and confuse everyone else
The Brooklyn Paper
To the reams of paper, scores of legal proceedings, hours of hearings and years of anger over Atlantic Yards, you can now add one more thing: an unsuccessful theater production.
“In the Footprint,” a new play by the Fort Greene–based Civilians company, takes one of the most important stories in the history of Brooklyn — the battle over the $4-billion mega-development and basketball arena — and turns it into a series of strident monologues that will leave uninformed theatergoers with more questions about the project than answers.
And it will definitely leave opponents scratching their heads over the “betrayal” by the theater company.
...Given the trials and tribulations that [Bertha] Lewis’s ACORN has undergone over the past two years, it’s surprising that Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s take on the widely discredited Lewis is so effective at balancing what could have easily been a knee-jerk, anti-Yards play. But Grays’s effective monologue is one of the few truly dramatic moments in the entire 90-minute affair, which instead plays out like a series of one-sided arguments.
Arguments, in fact, that end up leaning noticeably towards the pro-Yards side, as the portrayal of Lewis and Caldwell combine into a completely rational case in favor of the project as a job creator and economic development tool. Meanwhile, Colleen Werthmann’s portrayal of Hagan turns a proud fighter into a collection of ticks, twitches and irrationality.
NoLandGrab: We've heard the opposite from more than one Atlantic Yards opponent — a belief that the show is decidedly critical of the project. Guess we — and you — will just have to see for ourselves.
Posted by eric at November 19, 2010 5:18 PM