Mara Lieberman

For most of its running time, "Dirty Books"—a slyly seductive immersive production written and directed by Mara Lieberman for Bated Breath Theatre Company—behaves less like a play than like a forbidden object one has discovered hidden in a filing cabinet marked “Moral Decay.” The audience enters a narrow white-walled performance space on West 14th Street that has been transformed into a miniature museum of American censorship: stacks of banned books, clothespinned documents, timelines of obscenity law, View-Masters displaying coyly erotic photographs, typewriters waiting for confessions. Before a word of drama has officially begun, the production has already implicated us in its central question: who gets to decide what stories may be told, what desires may be spoken aloud, and what forms of intimacy are permitted to exist in public? [more]