Written by Javierantonio González and directed by Meiyin Wang, Open up, Hadrian is an immersive promenade production that jumps more than 2,000 years and 20,000 square feet, transforming the Sunset Park warehouse into Ancient Rome by way of an excavated film set not so long abandoned.

In the years between the fall of the gods and the rise of Jesus, a young man named Hadrian emerged as Rome’s most philosophical emperor, caught in the midst of two bloody wars of expansion. He loved poetry, theatre, and all things Greek. He was also gay. Open up, Hadrian imagines the life of this highly successful but deeply frustrated man with elements of Greek drama and dark comedy—his anguished love, lofty ideals, and his big, famous wall.

Open up, Hadrian is an irreverent and contemporary play that looks back to a world 2,000 years younger and reads it variously as the nadir of imperial exploitation, a hotbed of radical political thought, a renaissance of engineering, and a raunchily naïve adolescent sex party. As “downtown theatre” comes more and more to mean “outer borough theatre,” this production celebrates an anarchic artistic “empire” throughout New York voracious as ancient Rome itself.