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Woodshed Collective at the West-Park Presbyterian Church, New York woodshedcollective.com ** SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from
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directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. “Site-specific, peripatetic theater is
enjoying a mini-boom” in New York City, said David Sheward in _Backstage._ It started with _Sleep No More,_ which stages a _Macbeth_-like drama on five floors of a Chelsea hotel and feels
like a “dream-like smash-up between Hitchcock and Shakespeare.” Now there’s _The Tenant,_ adapted by six playwrights from a 1964 French novella and mounted in a five-floor Upper West Side
church. While the main story line concerns Trelkovsky, “a pathetic Everyman type” who moves into a new Paris apartment after the previous tenant commits suicide, there are seven other
plotlines that an audience member can choose to follow. Unfortunately, “the fragmentary nature of the enterprise makes comprehension nearly impossible.” Actually, that sense of
disorientation enhances the mood, said Andy Propst in _TheaterMania​.com._ “What impresses most about the production is how astutely the company builds the intensity and suspense” as
Trelkovsky comes to believe that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into the previous tenant. Following Michael Crane’s “marvelously intense performance” as Trelkovsky for “at least a
good portion of the piece” is “highly recommended.” But the tangential stories also have merit; everyone in the 23-member company makes even “glimpses” of the plot thread intriguing. Such a
site-specific production, however, makes it “important to get the details right,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the _New York Post._ With _The Tenant,_ “the execution is way too careless.”
This is supposed to be an apartment building in 1960s Paris, yet there’s a 1978 Rolling Stones album in one room and a _Vogue_ cover sloppily pasted onto a copy of _New York_ magazine in
another. The video projections, which are supposed to help guide the journey, contain “cutesy mangled French” that looks like it was generated by Google Translate. All of this “breaks the
immersive mood, which is key to a conceptual show.” There’s no price for admission to _The Tenant,_ but “that may be too high a price” for an experience that utterly fails to engage. A free
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