Caveat
“Caveat makes smart entertainment for smart people.”
With New York’s Caveat, speakeasies just got smart. A non-descript black door with a ‘c’ logo leads down a staircase and a basement space that looks like the kind of nighttime-entertainment setting you are probably familiar with: an intimate theater with chairs and round café tables facing a stage and a bar backdrop. But there are hints of something else – a library and gallery also feature within the space, and a program that includes things like this: Chaos Theory: An Off-The-Rails TED Talk On The Underlying Chaos Of Our Lives and The Nerds & The Bees: Comedy And Data — What’s Really Happening In Modern Dating.
If you like anything produced by NPR, listen to podcasts and Audible on your commute, and get excited about deep heady dives into ideas, then Caveat, a performance venue in New York’s Lower East Side, might just be your spiritual home. Here you’ll always find the kind of material that gets your brain working, unashamedly so. There is nothing even slightly uncomfortable here about knowledge, maybe because its positioned in ways that are ‘fucking funny’ by co-founders Ben Lillie (a particle physicist and co-founder of science podcast, The Story Collider) and Kate Downe (who has directed opera and Shakespeare, and led renegade museum tours). Nerdy stuff is made cool, high concepts accessible, and the esoteric absurdly wonderful.
Caveat produces its own shows, a combination of storytelling, interactive games, music, comedy and performance that range across science, philosophy, literature and academia and are hosted by university professors, anthropologists, philosophers, academics, neuroscientists and other brainy types. Live podcasts are also recorded here, authored both in-house like Nevertheless she existed and out-of-house like Monica McCarthy’s The Happier Hour. If you are finding this is your thing, you can also become a Member.
And its all with booze. Drinking kills brain cells, but here it supports the making of new ones (kind of), through smart programs designed to get your mind working and your belly laughing. Like a night of college all over again, but this time around it really is about that learning part and not just the drinking.
