4 TO 7 is either going to be a show you get or you don’t. A free verse, train-of-thought epic poem chronicling the early morning walk home for DJ Lionel Fantom (Kevin Leonard), 4 TO 7 has writer Emmanuel Martin Di Feliciantonio and director Rommell Sermons testing the outer bounds of where traditional theater ends and rhapsody begins. 4 TO 7 is also strictly not a solo show, with Krystian Saxbi and Marsha St. Julien aiding as silent walk-on extras, embodying the
kind of creatures of the night whose fleeting relationships are often only felt in passing. This is all what I mean when I say the show is very much something you’ll either get instinctively or have no frame of reference for, with Feliciantonio’s text capturing an incredibly specific feeling
to folks who find themselves out and about at 4:00 am after all the bars close.
Every choice made by Sermons exemplifies and amplifies the messy particulars of Fantom’s story. The first moments of 4 TO 7 are spent in dimly lit silence, Fantom having a long smoke
break at the end of his set. It’s a polarizing choice that eats up valuable production time, but for a show that relies heavily on mood and tone, opening in such a moody way sets the tone better than dialogue ever could. From there, Fantom begins his walk from the Lower East Side to Ocean Hill, bringing the audience along for the ride inside his scattered, turbulent psyche. The soliloquy plays out episodically, Fantom drawing out verse from the locations and memories he passes by on his trek. The sites and sounds of the city are spun into freeform, flowing verse, turning passing references into a torrent of memories. Sermon’s direction flows seamlessly from
one bar to the next, and Leonard’s delivery of Fantom’s soliloquy is hypnotic.
There is a deep tragedy to Fantom’s narrative, as the audience begins to uncover more of the story being told both in and around him. The late 90’s NYC is as much a character within the text as Fantom is, perhaps more so. Lionel Fantom is an old man in a young man’s world, moving day to day within a city that is rapidly changing right under his feet. He holds a
nostalgia for a New York City that’s now long gone, if it were ever real at all, and a fear for a future living in a city he no longer recognises.
Key moments find themselves interrupted by Saxbi and St. Julien, who dance on to portray the groping couples, wandering drunks, graveyard shifters, and silent bodies that remain awake in the city that never sleeps. Saxbi and St. Julien’s motion is captivating, each one inhabiting characters that are instantly recognisable to any denizen of the Big Apple. The set itself
additionally works to punctuate the solemn mood, the snug 35 seat Beckman theater is covered tip to tail in posters, flyers, and classical new york accoutrement. There’s a Phone booth off to
the corner that, for all intents and purposes, plays the part of the traditional theater wings, and an entire DJ turn table that’s used by Leonard at the bookends of his odyssey.
By the end of the morning Fantom has returned home, changed, but no different than he was last night. The audience leaves the theater, and is now free to walk out into a NYC that has been changed, but no different than the one Fantom would have walked some 30 years ago. 4 TO 7 is required viewing to anyone who finds themselves out and about after NYC’s witching hour, and to all of the rest I recommend you go for a nice walk tonight and see what all the hype is about.
The Independent Artists movement 