Class Dismissed

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What happens when creators conjure what might be best described as an, in their words, “academia of the mind”—a heady, unrelenting swirl of poetry, polemic, and psychodrama. At the core of Class Dismissed, a madcap professor reigns, equal parts oracle and chaos agent, orchestrating a feverish intellectual fugue with two students who volley free-associative diatribes that pulse with anti-capitalist fervor. Orbiting their volatile seminar is a privileged poet, more ghost than guide, adding a layer of lyrical dissonance to this already anarchic classroom. The result is dense, disorienting, and defiantly uncommercial—a theatrical manifesto masquerading as a fever dream. And this is the wonder of Class Dismissed.

The piece comes with an impeccable pedigree for downtown theater. It has a text by Robert Lyons. Lyons established the original Ohio Theatre on Wooster Street in 1993, a downtown haven for boundary-pushing performance. When the Soho space was sold, he resurrected its spirit in 2011 as the New Ohio at 154 Christopher Street. Under Lyons’ visionary leadership, both incarnations of the Ohio became incubators for some of the most daring and influential ensembles in contemporary theater—count among them the Les Freres Corbusier, an early venture for Alex Timbers, director of Moulin Rouge! and Here Lies Love, Vampire Cowboys, Clubbed Thumb, the TEAM (a home to Rachel Chavkin, director of Hadestown and The Thanksgiving Play), and Tina Satter’s Half Straddle. Each company left its mark, shaping the avant-garde landscape with work that challenged, redefined, and reimagined what theater could be.

Enter Daniel Irizarry, director and actor, playing Professor Watson, sporting a symphony conductor’s tails (but with hot pink trim on the pants legs and a motif of mathematical equations on the coat fabric), bright orange and purple footwear and a purple wig that can easily double as a Swiffer power duster. Yes, he definitely gets your attention with an infectious smile and if he makes eye contact, it is intense and yet the pupils (the ones in his eyes, not the ones in the audience) are in frenetic overtime, cataloguing everything in his path.

Irizarry’s is a very physical theater with the actors taking chances at every turn of the text. Irizarry explains: “In the tradition of dada, clowning, and the grotesque, my projects incorporate a communal exchange of germs through hugging, licking, eating, and sweating between the actors and the audience. I strive to create theater that offers us this unique connectivity.” Hence, that may be a very literate clarification for why he licked the forehead of one member of the audience…twice.

With this back and forth communication with the audience there are very many opportunities to be pulled into the action. After all, it is a class. Get ready to (consensually) join in as we peel yuca, improvise dances, pillow fight, churn butter, and take the stage to eat (fresh bread, which served warm goes very well with the butter), drink (Puerto Rican rum), write on the set (with chalk), and trade books (that everyone should have brought along to the show, but never fear, they have a loaded Library book truck of selections you can use for the show). The two grad students (Yaraní del Valle Piñero and Rhys Tivey) on stage, who give very committed performances, are clearly not the only students here. We as a group read aloud from our books (all different) so it segues into a cacophony of literature that somehow makes sense.

The Professor has terrible short-term memory. If you volunteer to participate in one of his exercises, he forgets your name as soon as you utter it. All females are Jane and all males are James. The Other-Lit-Professor, played by Pepper Binkley, plays very much to the audience, unpacking a suitcase of wine and performing love poems inspired by her recent affair in a prestigious artist colony residency in Italy. Where the two students jabber away in stream of consciousness non sequiturs, the Other-Lit-Professor speaks in verses that fit comfortably into “rap-less” poetry slams. While we are meant to think that the Professor is sinking into dementia, his speeches are the most linear…in fact, there’s an ingratiating ebullience to everything he says to us. He gives us a big grin and we will follow him anywhere.

The performers inhabit a shared space that hums with latent connectivity, even in the absence of direct dialogue. Their presence to and for one another—unspoken yet palpable—forms the quiet backbone of the piece. What unfolds is a relentless swirl of Marxist theory and grand philosophical overtures, repeated like mantras against a backdrop of absurdist physicality. Narrative cohesion is eschewed in favor of thematic resonance: a professor marks chalk outlines around a silent woman while students volley fervent monologues; later, those same students offer murmured asides as the professor ascends to a pulpit-like presence. Though no linear thread binds them, their trajectories intersect often and with theatrical charge, forming a constellation of meaning just out of reach.

Clocking in at two hours, this production offers a Dadaist slog through an academic echo chamber—language divorced from meaning, recited in a loop of decontextualized abstraction. It’s a cerebral endurance test with the occasional clever phrase glinting in the fog. It would appear that there is little here to anchor the imagination, let alone stimulate it, but it is the director’s (and Professor’s) show as he gleefully conjures a theater of imagery that does just that…His “task” is cataloging the “complete unwritten works of our esteemed author” leading us to an unearthed “unwritten napkin jottings” if the unwritten ‘texts” didn’t already intrigue us.

Irizarry’s spectacle is ably supported by a genius set and costume designer in Deb O. The students change from ordinary comfortable clothes for attending class to what amounts to “lab gear;” the Other-Lit-Professor is your typical well-dressed professor but comfortable enough to be rolling on the floor picking up chalk markings in her travel. The Professor’s outfit is a colorful delight until he changes into an oversized white bunny suit with hoodie. Lighting designer Robin Abraham Ediger-Seto gives us the extremes of darkness accompanied by audience cell phone flashlights as well as fluorescent poles carried by the actors to light their own way. Actor Rhys Tivey provides seductive original compositions for when we aren’t feeling the party grooves of Bad Bunny.

Class Dismissed bursts onto the stage with the wild, bright energy of youthful minds dreaming beyond the margins—an effervescent ode to imagination in a world where academia has curled inward, weary and self-obsessed. This satirical marvel skewers the ivory tower with wit and wonder, offering a gleeful escape hatch into possibility, just when the institution seems most drained of it.

Class Dismissed (through May 4, 2025)

Soho Think Tank & One-Eighth Theater

Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 66 East 4th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.ovationtix.com

Running time: two hours with a very brief intermission