“Canonically, there is one song in the show that takes place in a cafe,” says Emily Haynes Curtis. “We have changed that to like seven.”
She’s referring to “Ordinary Days,” which is currently playing an eight-show run at Joe Coffee’s original West Village location, where both Haynes Curtis (who is also producing and directing) and her co-star/manager Adam Harrison, both work. By day, it’s a bustling coffee shop (the NYC-based cafe now has 24 locations in and around the city), serving regulars and occasional visitors, like Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan; by night, it’s the set for Adam Gwon’s sung-through musical about four strangers in New York—a grad student, an aspiring artist, and a couple—as they collide, get lost, and find meaning in the city’s unbending chaos.
With musical direction by Sawyer Whitted, actors Karlo Siriban and Charlotte Alexander join as the couple, Jason and Claire. “It’s a story about how frustrating it is to be in a big city with a small dream, or a big dream and you don’t know how to get there,” says Haynes Curtis, seated in Joe’s basement, which also serves as its office. “It’s about how creating community is about being in the right place at the right time. Next to her sits Harrison, who has spent many hours, days, weeks down here, preparing schedules, dealing with inventory and supplies. He’s wearing a blue button-up shirt with several playful geese, and the words “Silly Little Guy” embroidered, by Haynes Curtis, on the pocket. “It’s about happenstance,” he says. “Our experience at Joe mimics that so closely: the friendships and the relationships that we have with the customers but also with each other.”
Haynes Curtis, who has a degree in musical theater and is a co-founder Em&Em Productions, spent a semester studying site-specific theater in the United Kingdom. “Ordinary Days” appealed to her after “‘Seussical’ got immediately vetoed,” she jokes. The play fit the place; much of it takes place in a coffee shop; while there were lighting and sound challenges, it made sense.
“I sent a bunch of emails. I thought our CEO would say ‘No, you can’t do that’. I thought the licensing company would say, ‘No, you can’t do that’. And no one did,” she says. “So here we are.”
The show is a brisk, bouncy 80 minutes, with no intermission. Coffee is not served.
“Site-specific theater has a very long history, as old as theater itself,” says Dr. Erin Mee, an associate professor at NYU whose own site-specific “Ferry Play” can, and has, only been performed on the Staten Island ferry (whether “Ordinary Days” at Joe is actually “site-specific” theater depends on your definition of the term). Millenia ago, Ancient Greeks performed on dithyrambs, while Medieval religious pageants took place on carts.
Dr. Mee points to a burgeoning scene of experimental theatre in New York in the 1960s and ’70s—La Mama began as a cafe; Squat theatre’s Hungarian emigres performed in a shop storefront on West 23rd—that tapered as the century entered its last decades. “Now that rents are so high in New York City, real estate is so completely out of control, and post-COVID, many theaters shut down, there’s an entirely new sort of ecosystem for theater, and I think theater people are making theater everywhere again,” she says. In recent years, a production of “Sweeney Todd,” which eventually moved to the Barrow St. Theater, started out at a literal pie shop in London. “Titanique,” now on Broadway, began its initial run in a basement of a Gristedes.
Theater in alternative spaces “bleeds all sorts of lines that have been drawn,” says Dr. Mee. Performing in a coffee shop opens up an audience to a multisensory experience. We normally take in theatre with our eyes and ears. At Joe, which can hold an audience of 30, there’s not only the established rhythms of the space, but the smell of coffee, a sense more associated with emotion and memory. “That does open up more pathways of perception,” she says.
For Haynes Curtis and Harrison, showing their audience what was possible is just as important as effect. “Everyone dreams on such a large scale, and I hope that this show gives them permission to let the opportunities that are uniquely available to you come to light,” says Curtis.
“In New York, to be a starving artist in 2026, what does that mean?” says Harrison. “I hope the play allows people to widen their horizons a little bit. You can be a barista and be an actor at literally the same time. You make your own opportunities.”
“Ordinary Days” will be staged at Joe Coffee at 141 Waverly Place at 8pm on September 17-20 and 20-24. Buy tickets online.
