Best Experimental Theater Troupe

“E.R.S. is the shit!” exclaims Mark Russell, artistic director of Performance Space 122, which the seven-year-old theater troupe calls home. “Among the renaissance of experimental companies happening today, they are the most adventurous, taking their influences from Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group and making their own voice from that history.” Indeed, by day, E.R.S. co-director John Collins, 28, works as a sound designer for the Wooster Group. “More than any particular aesthetic,” says Collins, “I learned from them about the freedom I can have working on plays.” The fifteen-member troupe is presenting an as-yet-identified work-in-progress based on vaudeville and various documentaries May 7 through 10. On its heels, May 14 through 17, comes a return engagement of Cab Legs, an experiment with traditional narative that moves between intimate scenes of whispered dialogue and dance numbers based on Indian cinema and old Cab Calloway cartoons. “We want our audiences to laugh,” says Steve Bodow, 31, Collins’s partner in performance crime, “but not always to be sure why they’re laughing.”