On Thursday, March 2, a group of twenty Bard Graduate Center students, faculty, and staff attended Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson at New York Theatre Workshop. It was a wonderfully inventive show, one that takes a loving look at the clutter that you knowingly keep, and the things that somehow stay with you. Through rummaging and remembering, this one-person play uses objects as a bittersweet and joyful window into the past and teases out how our stuff both connects us to others and helps form our sense of self. Even the small things we hold on to, the play suggests, become part of the roots we (sometimes inadvertently) put down.
For many of us, though, the evening’s highlight was when Sobelle pulled Professor Paul Stirton out of the audience to gamely hold a chandelier for a dining scene, which he did to great effect. And he even got fed for his labor.
