Oren Safdie’s latest play debuts this April at Urban Stages
A new play by Oren Safdie will be read to the public for the first time on April 16 at Urban Stages in New York City facade, dramatizes the recent expansion of MoMA and its architects’ controversial decision to demolish the highly regarded Folk Art Museum next door. A fiction that imagines what might have happened between the designers of the expansion – Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio – and their friends, the designers of the ill-fated monument on the path of their ambitions – Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. This dramatic action comes in the context of the intense scrutiny of the project by the architectural community, the New York press and the general public.
“This is definitely comedy,” Safdie said A, “more on the cutthroat nature of the profession. So hopefully architects will cringe as much as they laugh.”
Safdie, the son of Moshe Safdie, studied architecture at Columbia University before turning to writing plays. This is his fifth piece focusing on the world of architecture. His previous work in this area includes Private jokes, public places; The Bilbao Effect; Wrong solution; And colorblindwhich was previously reviewed in A. He has also directed films including you can thank me later and which will be published soon The sunflower. Safdie is currently an Assistant Professor on the English Department at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.
The first reading of facade is taking place at Urban Stages on Sunday 16 April at 19:00, but you can get a taste of the comedy that follows with the clip below. In it, Alejandro and Ella, Safdie’s fictional designers of the MoMA expansion, discuss what to do with the folk art museum designed by their friends Lilly and Thomas in the play:
abstract
Alejandro and Ella stand side by side over a tabletop, studying the drawings spread out.
ELLA: Damn it Alejandro, our design is better without hers – isn’t that enough?! To leave it in place is to deny the natural course of evolution. A giant step backwards for humanity. How would you like to be remembered? Because a hundred years from now, when we’re nothing but calcium phosphate, six feet underground, we’re going to be leaving behind what people will remember — not some friendship that’s been on the brink of crisis since we beat them out to that cutesy one Boathouse in Connecticut.
ALEJANDRO: Everything I say –
ELLA: Not worth the words you’re trying to put out.
ALEJANDRO: Because you won’t let me –
ELLA: Break it up.
ALEJANDRO: What?
ELLA: Start with the interior.
ALEJANDRO: There are some interesting elements –
ELLA: It’s civilized and ill thought out.
ALEJANDRO: Okay, maybe it’s a bit finicky. –
ELLA: Incredibly confusing, claustrophobic and bewildering –
ALEJANDRO: Good, the stairs work.
ELLA: And once you get rid of that, is there really any reason to keep the rest?
(Alejandro freezes.)
Can you nod your head when you hear what I say?
(He only nods slightly, but enough.)
Thank you very much.
Ella walks away as if everything is settled.
ALEJANDRO: But we keep the facade.
(Ella stops and turns around.)
I like the facade.
ELLA: (taunts him) You “like” the facade.
ALEJANDRO: Yes.
ELLA: You “like” the facade.
ALEJANDRO: A lot.
ELLA: What do you “like” about the facade? That it’s an understated cross between a rubber climbing wall and a cheap George Braque knockoff.
ALEJANDRO: Not so much that part, but unlike the other manufactured facades in this city, which feel like they just rolled off an assembly line, it’s inherently human… And I like that.
ELLA: How did you come up with that?
ALEJANDRO: Where did I think of something?
ELLA: That’s not how you speak.
ALEJANDRO: I speak as I speak.
Ella has a hunch, walks over to a stack of magazines and flips through the pages before stopping.
ALEJANDRO: What are you doing?
ELLA: (reads): “…man made, not rolled off an assembly line…” You just quoted The New Yorker – only you slaughtered it. Did Thomas threaten you?
ALEJANDRO: No.
ELLA: Because it would be incredibly stupid of you to give in just because you’re scared of him. I would lose respect for you.
ALEJANDRO: What you don’t want to accept is that the people of this city love this facade!
ELLA: What people?
ALEJANDRO: Don’t you read? Letters to the editor, articles in all the magazines – they made a shrine out of it! It’s totally irrational!
ELLA: Exactly!
ALEJANDRO: But people like it!
ELLA: No, Goldberger and Hawthorne like it. Everyone else jumps on board.
ALEJANDRO: So why do you like it?
ELLA: That’s your measure now?
ALEJANDRO: I don’t remember you having a problem with it when they praised our expansion of the concert hall.
ELLA: That’s where we needed her. We are beyond that now. Critics Proof! … You don’t achieve that kind of status just to piss it off for a bunch of sentimentalists.
ALEJANDRO: Well, fuck the people, fuck the critics, who needs friends! … But you and I both know there’s a price to pay for tearing down that facade.
ELLA: Maybe… In the short term… But once things settle down and people see what we built in its place, they’ll forget it ever existed.
ALEJANDRO: You seem so confident.
ELLA: That’s what you love about me.