Watching The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux] can feel like a crazy-making experience, befitting a play about a man driven to-infinity-and-beyond his wits’ end.

During every second of this one-hour Under the Radar production — now at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre (the first reemergence since Covid of Next Door @ NYTW!) — the audience must choose whether to look at the screen or the stage. There’s constant action on both, so eyes and heads will be darting back and forth, our only chance of keeping up with the dually-unfolding, hybrid-media mayhem. 

It’s a manic way to spend an evening at the theater, mirroring the protagonist’s escalating mania. My brain was spinning trying to figure out the manipulation of space (and time!) between stage and screen.And then there’s the typical shared plight between character and audience: attempting to understand the convoluted lunacy of the actual plot, the very events that turn our protagonist into a lunatic. 

As such, you may feel like a loon while inside the confines of The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux].

---

This project began as a streaming play, and the differences between viewing it alone at home, or surrounded by others, seems thematically relevant…