INTERVIEW: Joshua William Gelb on becoming ‘Egon Tichy’
Photo: The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux] stars Joshua William Gelb. Photo courtesy of Maria Baranova / Provided by Everyman Agency with permission.
For the past several years, Joshua William Gelb has become Egon Tichy, in form or another. The performer brings the lonesome space traveler to life in the show The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, which first premiered as a streaming-only creation back during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, a [redux] version is playing at the New York Theatre Workshop through Sunday, Feb. 2, allowing audience members the rare chance to see the space traveler in person.
In the piece, which was written by Josh Luxenberg and directed by Jonathan Levin, the title character finds himself alone in space facing an uncertain future. He needs help in order to survive, but the problem is that it’s just him up there. So, he does what any other astronaut would do: He begins to multiply in order to find some helpers.
“It’s been really thrilling actually,” Gelb said in a recent phone interview about this sold-out run of shows, which is part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival. “The piece originated or was first produced in the early pandemic days … and was just one of our earliest big successes.”
Since those days when theater was relegated to streamable options due to the safety issues of congregating in person, Theater in Quarantine has expanded and focused more on hybrid and in-person work.
“It sort of became a natural impulse to get back together with John and Josh from Sinking Ship and revisit this piece,” he said. “In many ways, we realized that there was so much that our audience wasn’t seeing that was just incredibly fun and theatrical, in particular everything I am doing in the closet in order to achieve all these live effects. It’s almost a whole second performance, and so what we are putting on stage is just that. You get to see both me behind the scenes kind of contorting myself and running through this obstacle course to create this movie, this one-person movie that is being projected onto two large movie screens.”
Some in the audience at NYTW are familiar with The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy because they purchased a streaming ticket a few years ago. Others are experiencing the sci-fi comedy for the first time, in this new [redux] form.
“I think we’ve had a nice balance of people who are familiar with it and familiar with all of the Theater in Quarantine lore, and people who are really just coming in and experiencing the piece as its own story and its own world,” Gelb said. “It’s really exciting that it can work for both audiences.”
The legend of Tichy comes courtesy of Stanislaw Lem, who wrote several stories about this lonesome space traveler. Gelb and the creative team used Lem’s words as a starting-off point and then fleshed out the character and the world he resides in.
“I guess we did a whole lot of work in terms of … building out not just who the character is but who the character becomes over the course of this time-travel adventure,” he said. “The piece, of course, is about his spaceship breaking, and he needs or requires a second set of hands, except he’s on a one-person mission. And so falling into a series of time vortexes, he has to convince various versions of himself to attempt to help him fix the spaceship, and he fails over and over and over again. It’s all about the ways in which we’re our own worst enemy, you could say, but this version of the piece really does lean into an immense theatrical emotional trajectory of these different versions of Egon Tichy. So it’s been extremely rewarding to actually sit down in a run and really settle into this performance for the first time because every other time it’s always been just a one-off here, one-off there. This is the first time I’m running it for several weeks.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux], starring Joshua William Gelb, continues through Sunday, Feb. 2, at the New York Theatre Workshop. The production, written by Josh Luxenberg and directed by Jonathan Levin, is co-produced by A Sinking Ship and Theater in Quarantine. Its run is part of the Under the Radar Festival. Click here for more information and tickets.