Theater: Joe's Pub...at the / Public Theater, New York, NY, 10003
Synopsis:
No Place to Go is the first Joe's Pub commission, as part of its New York Voices Series, to become part of The Public Theater's season.
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March 21, 2012: You know those thoughts that wake you up at 3:35 in the morning? The ones that so many Americans are having now, in this age of high unemployment and rising prices, about the bottom falling out of their safe little worlds.
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March 21, 2012: The spirit of Woody Guthrie is alive and well in the East Village, thanks to Ethan Lipton’s “No Place To Go,” a “musical ode to the unemployed.”
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March 21, 2012: Ethan Lipton’s No Place to Go is a musical parable about running out of time in the modern economy, except that Lipton doesn’t seem interested in running anywhere. He’s a shuffler at most: resolutely unflashy in a neoretro oddball way, in a thrift-store brown print shirt, navy-blue suit and faintly defeated mustache. And what he really wants is to just stay put, working his longtime job as an “information refiner” at an unnamed publication while moonlighting as “an emerging playwright and an old-timey singer-songwriter.” (“This means that by the time I die, I will be rich in anecdotes,” he notes.) But his employer, in search of ever-higher profits, is moving the operation from the big city that Lipton calls “our town” to a place where real estate is cheaper—the planet Mars—and Lipton must decide whether to follow.
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March 21, 2012: Ethan Lipton’s “musical ode to unemployment,” “No Place to Go,” is definitely topical. With the seemingly never-ending recession and the nationwide Occupy movement serving as context, the jobless and the underpaid will no doubt find solace in Lipton’s cabaret evening about layoffs and corporate hierarchy. Lipton, however, works in the arts, an industry that boasts high unemployment with or without a poor economy. In addition, the classy though crowded Joe’s Pub is not your typical gritty downtown venue. Bohemian whining in such surroundings comes across as ironic rather than sympathetic.
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March 21, 2012: Emblazoned on the cover of the program for No Place to Go, the new concert-musical playing at Joe's Pub through April 8, are the words "This is for the 100%." If that statement carries with it the implication of incendiary activism along the lines of Occupy Wall Street, Ethan Lipton's show never lets on. Rather than dwelling on platitudes and catch phrases about class warfare, it's too busy living up to the letter of that line, finding in the all-too-common experience of losing your job — or, depending on how you see things, abandoning it — feelings of emptiness, confusion, and betrayal that anyone can understand. Especially these days.
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