Meanwhile.
One hour. One or two performers. One audience member, or a couple. One plate of literary theater, performed close enough to feel. Then the room resets and welcomes the next.
Decentralized across small black-box rooms throughout the New York corridor, running simultaneously every night. The atom of YOU, made portable. A library of pieces designed for the density Manhattan already has and the audience already wants.
Designed for a corridor, not a theater.
Meanwhile does not require a Broadway house, an off-Broadway transfer, or a single venue carrying a single production. The format runs in the small black-box rooms New York has more of than any other city in America.
A single venue runs five performances of a Meanwhile piece in an evening. The room resets between audiences. Across the corridor, multiple pieces run in parallel at multiple venues. An audience member's evening might string two Meanwhile pieces together with a restaurant and a bar between them, routed by Endless Stage.
From PERIGEE.
Boxes and buckets and walls. You live in exactly that time where you are most constrained, where the binding forces of normal pinch tightest. So tight that you just think of them as your skin.
No age has been further from the truth of life. Further from the ordinary beauty of sex and the fetid stench of death. We hide these things behind their tame exaggerations.
Meanwhile is adult theater, written at literary density, designed for an audience close enough to feel the words land. It is not family entertainment. It is not a touring musical. It is the work that filled rooms for fourteen years at Sleep No More, compressed to one hour and made portable to any black-box room in the city.
What it looks like for an audience member.
Player opens Endless Stage. Their quest for the night is generated from their profile and the night's available performances. They confirm.
Arrives at a small black-box room in the West Village. One hour of literary theater, performed for them and one other person. They are not addressed from a stage; they are inside it.
App routes them to a partnered restaurant ten minutes away. Quiet table held in their name. Dinner is unhurried.
Second Meanwhile piece. Different venue. Different performers. Different plate.
Last stop is a bar a few blocks east. The night closes there.
The morning after, the work is still moving in them. That is the design.
YOU, 2017.
Meanwhile descends from a single production staged in downtown Los Angeles in 2017. Fourteen performances. One audience member per night. Seven actors. Seventeen plates, chosen from a menu the guest worked through over four hours inside a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse stage.
The play sold out in advance to recording artists, television talent, and corporate and finance executives. The press understood what it was. Newsweek called it the most expensive theater ticket in the world and felt its defenses fall away inside the room. LA Weekly profiled the economics on the cover of its culture section.
What YOU proved is what Meanwhile carries forward: design every element for perfection, then price honestly. Pay the artists what the work is worth. The atom of attention, built at literary depth, holds. The ceiling YOU revealed was scale: a perfect four-hour evening for one audience member at five thousand dollars cannot fill the rooms a theater company needs to fill. Meanwhile is the format that took the atom and made it portable.
“The revolutionary idea is simply to charge what something costs. It says so much about theater, but also says so much about the potential of this idea.”Daniel Student, director of YOU
Endless Stage routes the network.
Meanwhile is the content. Endless Stage is the routing infrastructure that makes the content reach the audience and monetize the venues that host the corridor between performances.
The two are coupled. A literary 1-to-1 theater format does not work without a routing layer that fills the rooms. A routing layer does not work without content of this caliber to route through. That coupling is the company.
Three doors.
Back the slate.
Production-LLC investment in the first cohort of Meanwhile pieces and venues. Reg D, accredited only.
Audition for the library.
Casting is by submission. The work is intimate, literary, and demanding. Bring a representative reel and let us know which piece pulls you.
Host the room.
We are looking for small NYC black-box rooms that can run five performances a night, six nights a week, and want a literary theatrical residency.