On a recent Saturday night in downtown Manhattan, a sold-out crowd at the Cherry Lane Theatre delighted in one of the most bizarre sights in recent New York stage memory: comedian Natalie Palamides, dressed as if in split screen – her left side bedecked in Y2K girl signifiers (butterfly clips, low-rise jeans), her right in bro clothes (cargo pants, flannel) – barreling across the stage and tangling with … herself. In her one-woman show Weer, the Los Angeles-based clown plays two halves of a toxic relationship over three late-90s years, flipping between perspectives with the velocity of a spinning top.
The show is difficult to describe and perhaps more difficult to market, as well as gloriously unhinged and riotously funny – a bold gambit for a performer, as well as for the new Cherry Lane, the West Village staple recently renovated and reopened by A24. The film distribution company turned production studio turned cultural lodestar purchased the historic theater, billed as the “birthplace of Off-Broadway”, for $10m in 2023, as part of its expansion beyond the cultish, acclaimed arthouse films – Moonlight, Hereditary, Everything Everywhere All at Once, to name a few – that built their hip reputation for the cool and cutting edge. (Or, as some would argue, a certain loose but identifiable aesthetic – neon-drenched palette, buzzy cast, faces that have seen an iPhone – and provocative bent.) Following an interior overhaul – including new lighting and sound systems, redone upholstery, a screen and curtains for “cinema mode” and a restaurant (Wild Cherry) from hot Manhattan restaurant group Frenchette – Cherry Lane is reopened for business and aiming to attract high-minded, zeitgeist-oriented New Yorkers, whether or not they own an A24 hat.
