Written and directed by Steve Cosson, with songs by Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson composer Michael Friedman, In the Footprint is like The Laramie Project with cabaret songs, lurching video, and a sometime tongue in cheek. Alternately strident and piquant, it manages to make itself engaging without letting loose the righteous anger of agitprop — or agit-props, of which the show employs a few. Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, a sports fan and an advocate of the Atlantic Yards project, is represented by a basketball speaking into a microphone, pontificating architect Frank Gehry by a building model utilizing a cigar as a pointer. But these figureheads are for the most part unconventionally deployed talking heads. The people of Brooklyn, their arguments drawn verbatim from interviews, get gutsier treatment. And they're not all on the same side.
Fielding a fight that pitted citizen against citizen, In the Footprint presents African-American leaders, who foresaw affordable housing and jobs, scuffling not just with feisty white yuppies defending their gentrified territory but also with members of their own community. In the end, no surprise, the project survives but in compromised form. (The cheapened arena is said to resemble a George Foreman Grill.) This leaves no one in the winner's circle as the Civilians deliver their surprisingly sprightly epitaph for a neighborhood.
Related:
Undiscovered country, Play by Play: May 1, 2009, Autumn garden, More 
- Undiscovered country
A young woman steps off the Elevator Styx into a Hades ruled by Pee-wee Herman.
- Play by Play: May 1, 2009
Theater around town
- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Mars vs. Venus
It’s been 21 years since Speed-the-Plow first milked the cravenness of Hollywood and the self-described “whores” who turn its celluloid tricks. But David Mamet’s scathing, staccato comedy has held up at least as well as Madonna, who made her Broadway debut in the original 1988 production.
- Joyful noise
From the clamorous arrival of some ghetto hot wheels to a scorching gospel finale, Best of Both Worlds warms up The Winter's Tale . The third entry in American Repertory Theater's Shakespeare Exploded! Festival, this sizzling and soulful gloss on the Bard's late romance mines Shakespeare's time- and realm-hopping fairy tale.
- Looking back, going forward
Economic recession and post-racial themes abound in Boston’s early 2010 theater repertoire.
- Diamonds in the rough
The setting is more boring '90s than Roaring '20s.
- Play by Play: March 19, 2010
Boston's weekly theater schedule.
- Play by play: May 14, 2010
Boston's weekly theater listings
- Curse and worse
The high point of Johnny Baseball , the new musical receiving its world premiere from the American Repertory Theater (at the Loeb Drama Center through June 27), comes two-thirds of the way through the second act.
- Play by Play: July 30, 2010
Opening this week: Bad Dates, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Rocky Horror Show, The Taster, and Violet.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Arsenal Center for the Arts, Loeb Drama Center, Anna Deavere Smith, More
, Arsenal Center for the Arts, Loeb Drama Center, Anna Deavere Smith, Thomas Derrah, New Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Kate Warner, ArtsEmerson, Paramount Black Box, In the Footprint: The Battle over Atlantic Yards, Less
