Storefronts Turned Stages for 'Seven Deadly Sins'

A live theatrical event in the Meatpacking district, featuring several playwrights and sets by David Rockwell, "turns New York itself into the playhouse."

On a balmy weekday afternoon in Manhattan's Meatpacking district, a small crowd gathered around a storefront window where a neon-lit pole dancer in purple platform stilettos performed an alluring routine. Passers-by stopped to gawk at the silent spectacle. Some took out their camera phones.

There was no way for them to know that this was a rehearsal of a short play called "Lust," or that soon the dancer would be performing it nine times a night. On the sidewalk, the director Moisés Kaufman sat in a bistro chair, surrounded by members of his Tectonic Theater Project. Through their headsets they heard what the pedestrians could not: pulsing music and the character's narrated thoughts.

Across the street, sleek installations in other vacant storefronts a grave site, a dominatrix's dungeon were also sets for plays, one about greed, the other wrath. And that open storage container parked at the curb? It would become the stage for a piece about envy. Riffs on gluttony, pride and sloth would have wide windows in a disused space two blocks away.