For Lisa, the performing arts are: “the highest culmination of human aesthetic capability.” They consist of everything she loves: “literature, fashion, sculpture, makeup, music, etc., and, more than any other art form, are a direct communion between audience and performer.” She really likes BAM, “as their programming is always super interesting and broad,” but it is “La MaMa and St. Ann’s Warehouse (especially their puppet performances?!) that most consistently surprise” her. 

Lisa’s most memorable performances are two from the New York City Ballet: the “delightfully strange” Orpheus (costume design by Noguchi!!) — “such a playful interpretation of the myth” — and the 75th anniversary of the NYCB in 2023. “It was three Balanchine ballets (Classico Barocco, Orpheus, and Symphony in C), staged exactly as they were in their original iterations on the NYCB’s opening night. It felt like we were being let in on a secret lost to time.”

Pressed for the playwrights she follows, Lisa names Robert Wilson (though he’s sadly no longer with us), who in her eyes is “technically perfect.” She strangely came to him after reading about his theatrical adaptations of Pushkin’s Fairy Tales — “he’s made me completely reconsider light and color, I wish I could live in a world composed purely of Wilson’s designs.” For a still-living playwright, Lisa loves Annie Baker (“although she’s more of a realist than I’d normally go for”), whose “writing certifiably verges into the experimental, especially in the play ‘John,’ in which one of the characters has an absolutely bonkers monologue about scorpions, Benedictine Monks, and the universe.”

And lastly, Lisa’s favorite play is The Bedbug by Mayakovsky.