“I’m Not the Stranger You Think I Am,” a series of plays performed in a mobile four-by-eight-foot black booth, distills dramatic performance to a one-on-one experience. Photograph by Danny Bright

We go to the theatre for communal experiences, whether with an audience of a thousand or of ninety-nine. But what if it were just you? The aptly named company (entity? singularity?) Theatre for One has reduced play-going to its least populated imaginable form: one actor, one spectator. For starters, that means no competing with other audience members over armrests.

Playwrights on the order of Lynn Nottage, Will Eno, and Craig Lucas have contributed five-minute plays to the project, which goes by the collective title “I’m Not the Stranger You Think I Am.” The venue, created with the design studio LOT-EK, is a mobile four-by-eight-foot black booth that looks as if it were made of road cases. Between May 27th and 31st, it will be at Zuccotti Park, the erstwhile home of Occupy Wall Street, and then at the Grace Building plaza from June 2nd to 6th. Last week, it set up shop in the glass-covered Winter Garden at Brookfield Place—not to be confused with Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, which specializes in Theatre for One Thousand Five Hundred and Twenty-Six.

Since Brookfield Place is conveniently located across the street from the New Yorker offices, I slipped out one recent afternoon to take a look. The booth sat at on the far end of the atrium, protected by velvet ropes. A handful of curious souls were waiting in line. (Admission is free.) I was greeted by the project’s creator, Christine Jones, a scenic designer whose Broadway credits include “Spring Awakening” and “American Idiot.” “The idea came to me when I was lying in bed one morning,” Jones, who has long salt-and-pepper hair and wore a tangle of silver charm necklaces, explained. This was in 2002, and she had recently been to a friend’s wedding, where a magician performed a trick for her alone. There was “something so intoxicating” about the distillation of performance to one-on-one, she said. She was reminded of peep-show booths, confessionals, therapeutic offices, and the Cone of Silence from “Get Smart.” As she developed the concept, Jones spoke to a guy who designs actual peep-show booths in Manhattan. (He donated a chair.) She envisioned the playing space as a “moon-like structure” that would literalize the phrase “black-box theatre.” In 2010 and 2011, Theatre for One materialized in Times Square. She was working on “American Idiot” at the time, and one day cajoled Billie Joe Armstrong into performing incognito. When a die-hard Green Day fan got in, Jones recalled, “The booth started shaking.”

With a woman in a red jumpsuit standing guard, I settled in for “Play No. 1.” Unlike its hard-shell exterior, the inside of the booth had the red-velvet plushness of a boudoir, or the innards of a violin case. I sat and faced a partition, which peeled away to reveal a woman with long black hair and plaintive eyes sitting on a stool. “Are you lost?” she said, looking straight at me. “Or are you just waiting here for something or someone?” She waited for an answer. Was I supposed to respond? It was then that I realized that “Theatre for One” was something of a misnomer: the experience was all about two people, actor and observer—if that’s what I was. Suddenly, I became self-conscious. In an audience of many, you’re invisible. In an audience of one, you’re part of the show. I fixed my mouth into a neutral smile, stayed silent, and didn’t dare look away. The actress (Carmen Zilles, performing a monologue by Emily Schwend) went on to tell a story about getting lost on her way to her friend Maria’s house. I suddenly had the uncanny feeling of being in an audition room, sitting in judgment. A moment later, when her eyes welled up with tears, it felt like something more intimate—how often does a stranger look square at you and pour out her heart?

The next play was by Will Eno, known for his existential meta-comedies “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” and “The Realistic Joneses.” It was performed by a bearded man in a vest who was wearing a touch of eyeliner. He kept calling me “ladies and gentlemen.” At one point, he poked his head into my side of the booth—breaking whatever was left of the fourth wall. “It’s not like anyone’s keeping track of what I do in here,” he confided, a little menacingly. I was reminded of all the things that are exchanged between two people: secrets, threats, understandings. The play after that, by José Rivera, had the buffer of fiction, which was something of a relief—I felt less watched. I was at “lunch” with a woman resembling Katie Holmes, who narrated her mother’s devastating last days, spent in the hospital. Again, the dynamic shifted: I was unsure how to hold up my end of the conversation. Coos of sympathy? Smiles of appreciation? It felt like some newfound privilege, the ability to listen without the burden of response.

I saw five of the seven playlets on offer—all minor feats of characterization. The last, a stirring monologue by Lynn Nottage, was delivered by Keith Randolph Smith, a towering black actor dressed in work clothes. His character was begging me for a job; years earlier, he explained, he’d been attacked by a serial killer, and would do anything for cash. I was aware of the variety of bodies I’d seen, and of the element of surprise, and of the fact that the actors must have a similar experience as each audience member is unveiled. (To tell the truth, I had my hopes up for Billie Joe Armstrong.) Acting is often spoken of as a narcissistic pursuit, but it seemed much more humble at Theatre for One. Why crave the attention of multitudes when the most we can ask for is to be seen—fully, if momentarily—by just one person? Being an audience of one started to feel less indulgent, too. When I stepped out of the booth, the line was twenty deep.