Georgia Gardner Gray's High Line Performance, "Cookie"

For her High Line Performance commission, Gray presents Cookie. The play follows the traditional picaresque format, a literary style developed during the height of Spain’s Golden Age in which a clever but poor hero, a pícaro, uses their wits and tricks to survive in a corrupt and crumbling society. Drawing inspiration from 16th-century picaresque novellas like Lazarillo de Tormes and Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler, Cookie is a story of desperation disguised as elite ambition. At its center is Gunnar Churchwell, a sleazy yet charismatic suit salesman who arrives in Madrid, only to be recruited by the egomaniacal ringleader of a grifting crew of makeshift “tailors.” Their baseline rule for survival is simple: “never let them know you are hungry.”

Staged in the parking lot of the Meatpacking District’s former final meat purveyor, the performance unfolds around The Lair, a twisted aluminum sculpture resembling a street scaffold. Cookie critiques societal decay, and highlights anti-heroes who maneuver through the cracks of a glittering superpower purely to secure their next meal.