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STAGES Jay Scheib completes his sci-fi trilogy with ‘World of Wires’

By Joel Brown | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

PAULA COURT/THE KITCHEN

“World of Wires” premiered in New York in January and won an Obie for director Jay Scheib.

It sounds like a late-night freshman dorm debate after a marathon viewing of the “Matrix” trilogy: What if we’re all just bits and bytes in someone else’s computer simulation?

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But Jay Scheib’s “World of Wires,” which the adapter-director is staging at the Institute of Contemporary Art this weekend, comes with a more serious pedigree. Scheib is an associate professor of theater arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and well known as a writer and director of plays and opera. He was a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and won a 2012 Obie Award for directing “World of Wires” at the Kitchen in New York, where it premiered in January.

But the story line does have that mind-blowing feel. A man named Fred Stiller (Jon Morris) works for a corporation that has created a vast, complex computer simulation. A co-worker disappears and no one seems to remember her. He begins to investigate and finds that she has been deleted. His inquiry leads him to a disturbing discovery about his life.

“The spark for this,” Scheib says, “was me trying to figure out where the first reference in science fiction is to being able to plug oneself into a computer simulation, where you actually attach your nervous system to a computer.”

CONTINUE READING BELOW ▼

The quest led him to Daniel Galouye’s prophetic 1964 sci-fi novel, “Simulacron-3,” and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 adaptation of the book for German TV, called “Welt am Draht” (“World on a Wire”). “I became hooked,” Scheib says.

He had already made the first two parts of

a trilogy he calls Simulated Larger map / directions→ Cities/Simulated Systems, both of them WORLD OF WIRES edgy, hard-to-capsulize works based in Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 science fiction: “Untitled Mars (This Title Northern Ave., Boston MA Might Change)” and “Bellona, Destroyer of 617-478-3103. Cities,” which was seen at the ICA in 2011.

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He began to create his own adaptation of Friday Fassbinder’s script, first with MIT students

and later in a New York residency with his Date of first performance: Saturday regular troupe of actors. They began with Date closing: $25 exercises such as improvisations based on

still photos from the Fassbinder Ticket price: http://www.icaboston.org production. Company website: Later Scheib incorporated what he says was his own most intense life experience into the script.

“This funny fluidity between what’s real and what’s simulated, I didn’t really understand it until one night at a Duane Reade drugstore right before it closed,” Scheib says with a chuckle. “I was there to buy some shampoo, and suddenly I found myself with a gun to my head for the next 45 minutes.”

This was near Columbia University in New York, a little over a decade ago. Scheib was caught in a takeover robbery in which two employees were badly beaten, he says.

“In one moment, [one of the robbers] held the gun away from me and pointed it at someone else, and I swear to this day it was a fake gun, like if he pulled the trigger a little ‘FIRE’ [flag] would come out the end,” Scheib says. “But of course I didn’t have the courage to test that theory at that moment.”

The perpetrators were never caught, he says, but the experience gave him insight into how much or how little the difference between authentic and ersatz might matter. “World of Wires” includes a “really intense” section in which the makers of the computer simulation demonstrate their product by creating a drugstore robbery scene in which the police arrive, shooting starts, and one person is killed.

“A lot of video game technology now is actors performing roles, and motion capture is being used to make very, very realistic situations in contemporary

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video games,” Scheib says. “We thought long and hard about things like Grand Theft Auto, where they’re simulating really high-adrenalin situations.”

No surprise that this production — which the ICA recommends for adults only, because of nudity and strong language — includes Scheib roaming the stage with a hand-held video camera, beaming a live feed to onstage monitors.

David Henry, the ICA’s director of programs, explains: “It eventually starts to dawn on some of the characters that they’re not sure if they’re really themselves or if they’re part of the computer simulation. And from that sort of lack of knowing comes a kind of existential humor. People break out and behave in all kinds of different ways, and they’re not sure if that’s who they are or if it’s part of the simulation. It’s kind of like the world we live in with the Internet.”

For the audience, it’s a layered experience, Henry says. “Your eyes are constantly moving back and forth between the live action and close-up video, which is the experience of watching a film as opposed to theater. Your eyes keep going back and forth between the theatrical and the media.”

As theory-laden as it sounds, Scheib and Henry describe “World of Wires” as the most easily digested segment of Scheib’s trilogy, driven by its thriller plot. “Up to this point, his narrative often could seem a bit opaque,” Henry says. “I found ‘World of Wires’ to be his most accessible work yet. It’s actually quite funny at times.”

Some theatergoers might once have been thrown by the reality-bending concepts. But Scheib and Henry say that’s no longer the case in a world where movies often delve into topics much like this one and Internet avatars and social networks provide an alternative to real-world interaction for many.

“It’s interesting to me that this was originally written in the 1960s, before computers were readily available,” Henry says. “Philosophers were already thinking ahead to what virtual worlds could mean and be, and now we’ve sort of gotten there.”

That, of course, is the nature of science fiction.

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“At this point,” Scheib says, “what we’re doing is really a history play.”

Joel Brown can be reached at [email protected].

5 of 5 9/21/12 10:12 AM Scheib wins 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship - MIT News Office 6/15/12 2:21 PM

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Scheib wins 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship Associate professor of theater arts awarded prestigious honor for mid- career professionals. Emily Hiestand, Communications Director School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

today's news April 11, 2011 multimedia Aircraft engineered Share with failure in mind Jay Scheib, associate may last longer professor of theater arts in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, has been awarded a 2011 fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Photo: Dominick Reuter The prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship is an award for New design approach tailors From "Bellona, Destroyer of advanced, mid-career planes to fly in the face of likely Cities" failures. professionals, who are chosen from among Researchers find thousands of distinguished building seismic strain in Azerbaijan artists, scholars and June 14, 2012 scientists. Awarded to those Study identifies enzymes who have demonstrated needed to mend tissue "exceptional capacity for damage after productive scholarship or Scheib, an associate professor of theater arts inflammation exceptional creative ability in Photo: Naomi White June 14, 2012 the arts," the fellowships are designed to allow recipients time to work with "as much creative freedom as possible." From "Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)" "In Jay Scheib, vision, ambition, talent and a restless hunger for creating new works are united," said Janet Sonenberg, professor of theater and head of Music and Theater Arts at related MIT. "MIT is the perfect fit for Jay and the Institute is lucky to have him. He's utterly unique." Jay Scheib

1, 2, trilogy Theater Arts

Reflecting on the fellowship, Scheib noted that, "It was awarded to help me finish a School of Humanities, Arts, and Social performance trilogy — Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems — that I have been Sciences developing at MIT. I have completed two productions of the work, and am currently developing the third, World of Wires. Part two, Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, just played in Paris as part of the Exit Festival and will be presented next month at the Institute of tags Contemporary Art in Boston. Having developed the first two parts of the trilogy at MIT, this is a fantastic affirmation — and not possible without the awesome support of MTA and the arts School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences." awards, honors and fellowships Works current and forthcoming http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/scheib-guggenheim-fellowship.html Page 1 of 2 Scheib wins 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship - MIT News Office 6/15/12 2:21 PM

faculty Scheib’s current productions include Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, which premiered at The Kitchen in New York, followed by a run at the Maison des Arts, Creteil (Paris), and will innovation and have its Boston premiere May 13, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. As a inventions director, Scheib's recent stagings include Beethoven's Fidelio at the Saarländische music Staatstheater in Saarbrücken, Germany; Evan Ziporyn’s A House in Bali at the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival; theater and Brecht’s Puntila und sein Knecht Matti at Theater Augsburg in Germany.

Forthcoming productions include a collaboration with choreographer Yin Mei based on Antonioni's documentary on China, shot at the height of the cultural revolution. Titled The Seven Sages, this new dance theater peformance will premiere next year in Hong Kong. Also in process is World of Wires, will be developed with students at MIT and will premiere at The Kitchen in New York in January 2012.

Works, continued

Other recent works include Untitled Mars (This Title May Change), which premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York followed by a tour to the National Theatre in Budapest, Hungary, and This Place is a Desert, which premiered at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art followed by a sold-out run at the Public Theater in New York as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Untitled Mars received an Obie Award for Scenic Design; This Place is a Desert was named one of the Ten Best Shows of 2008 by Time Out New York. Concurrent with these productions, Scheib’s collaboration with punk rock ensemble World/Inferno Friendship Society, Addicted to Bad Ideas, toured to numerous venues around the world, including Spoleto Festival USA, Peak Performances in Montclair, and the Luminato Festival in Toronto. Additional international works include the world premiere of Irene Popovic’s opera Mozart Luster Lustik in Belgrade, Serbia, Lothar Trolle’s Ein Vormittag in der Freitheit at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin and a new staging of the Novoflot science fiction opera saga Kommander Kobayashi in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Earlier awards

In the spring of 2009, Scheib was listed Best New York Theater Director by Time Out New York, and American Theater Magazine called him one of the 25 theater artists who will shape the next 25 years of American theater. Scheib is a recipient of the MIT Edgerton Award, The Richard Sherwood Award and the NEA/TCG Program for Directors. In addition to his position in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Scheib is a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.

For more images, visit MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

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http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/scheib-guggenheim-fellowship.html Page 2 of 2 Theater Arts Associate Professor Jay Scheib wins Obie Award - MIT News Office 6/15/12 2:21 PM

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Theater Arts Associate Professor Jay Scheib wins Obie Award Honored for his production of World of Wires Music and Theater Arts

today's news May 23, 2012 multimedia Aircraft engineered Share with failure in mind MIT Theater Arts Associate may last longer Professor Jay Scheib, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, received a coveted 2012 Obie Award — off- broadway's highest honor for his production of World of The production of World of Wires. The Obies, or Off- Wires Photo: Dominick Reuter Broadway Theater Awards, Photo courtesy of Jay Scheib are annual awards given by New design approach tailors The production of World of Wires planes to fly in the face of likely The Village Voice to selected Photo courtesy of Jay Scheib failures. theatre artists and productions worthy of distinction. Researchers find building seismic strain in Azerbaijan Scheib — a director, designer and author of plays, operas and installations — is June 14, 2012 internationally known for works of daring physicality, genre-defying performances and Study identifies enzymes deep integration of new technologies. needed to mend tissue damage after World of Wires is the final installment of the multidisciplinary Simulated Cities / Simulated inflammation System performance trilogy he developed at MIT. The trilogy is centered on collaborations June 14, 2012 with disciplines outside of traditional performing arts idioms such as civil engineering and similar stories urban planning, computer science and artificial intelligence, aerospace and astronautics. Music and Theater Arts Robert Lepage dazzles The first work, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change), simulated Mars on Earth, coupling Associate Professor Jay Scheib MIT community during material from the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah with the science-fiction visions of spectacular campus Photo: Naomi White Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and Kurd Lasewitz. The second work, Bellona, Destroyer of residency April 24-26, 2012 Cities, simulates a world that has become stuck in a loop of civil upheaval through Samuel related May 2, 2012 R. Delany's monumental novel Dhalgren. The final work, World of Wires, models one McDermott Award Earth inside of another Earth by borrowing heavily from the fictional backbone of computer Jay Scheib recipient Robert Lepage science and artificial intelligence. It is a performance about the unveiling of a computer collaborates and simulation so powerful that it is capable of simulating the world and everything in it. Music and Theater Arts converses with students W.O.W was adapted by Scheib after the film Welt am Draht by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; during campus the screenplay is based on the novel Simulacron-3 by American science fiction writer School of Humanities, residency Arts, and Social Science April 26, 2012 Daniel F. Galouye. Four from MIT win ARCHIVE: "Scheib wins prestigious Guggenheim Video: Watch a clip of World of Wires 2011 Guggenheim fellowships Fellowship" April 17, 2012 Reeling from the reality of people living their lives inside of machines, the play is an all- Jamshied Sharifi ‘83 bets-are-off homage to the startling possibility that you too might be ones and zeroes in recognizes the Arab someone else's programmed world. World of Wires is also inspired by the works of Oxford tags Spring with commission University Professor Nick Bostrom, including his compelling paper, "Are You Living in a http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/jay-schieb-wins-obie-award.html Page 1 of 2 Theater Arts Associate Professor Jay Scheib wins Obie Award - MIT News Office 6/15/12 2:21 PM

Computer Simulation?" for the MIT Wind arts Ensemble March 15, 2012 Directed by Scheib, the sold-out three-week engagement in January 2012 at the Kitchen awards, honors and in New York featured Sarita Choudhury, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Rosalie Lowe, Jon fellowships Morris, Ayesha Ngaujah, Laine Rettmer and Tanya Selvaratnam. The scenic design was by Sara Brown (a lecturer in theater arts at MIT), the costumes by Alba Clemente, the faculty sound design by Anouschka Trocker, lighting and video by Josh Higgason, and camera by music Jay Scheib. The stage manager was MIT alumna Susan Wilson '08. Kasper Sejersen and Laine Rettmer were the assistant directors, and Tanya Selvaratnam was the producer. theater

World of Wires garnered an array of rave and insightful reviews, interviews and preview alumni/ae articles including: David Cote's review in Time Out New York; AndrewAndrew's insta- staff review Papermag; Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times; Alex Zafiris' interview in BOMB; Scott Macauly's interview in Filmmaker Magazine; and Carmen García Durazo's review in Guernica, among others.

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mainekick - Congrats Jay Scheib 2012-05-25 05:15:23 Jay is so diverse and multi talented. Well deserved!

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/jay-schieb-wins-obie-award.html Page 2 of 2

The 2012 Obie Award Winners By Village Voice Staff, published: May 16, 2012

The 57th Annual Obie Awards were given out at a ceremony tonight, May 21st, at Webster Hall in the East Village. The awards were presented by acclaimed stage actors Eric McCormack, Grace Gummer, Hugh Dancy, Jonathan Pryce, Justin Bartha, Leslie Odom Jr., Lily Rabe, Michael McKean, Tonya Pinkins, Topher Grace, and Tracee Chimo.

Best New American Play (with $1,000 prize) Amy Herzog 4000 Miles

Performance: Cherise Boothe Milk Like Sugar (Playwrights Horizons and the Women's Project) Steven Boyer Hand to God (Ensemble Studio Theatre/Youngblood) Sweet and Sad Ensemble: Jon DeVries, Shuler Hensley, Maryann Plunkett, Laila Robins, Jay O. Sanders, & J. Smith-Cameron (The Public Theater) Gabriel Ebert and Mary Louise Wilson 4000 Miles (Lincoln Center Theater) Jim Fletcher Sustained Excellence Santino Fontana Sons of the Prophet (The Roundabout Theatre Company) Linda Lavin The Lyons (The Vineyard Theatre) Susan Pourfar Tribes (Barrow Street Theatre)

Playwriting: Kirsten Greenidge Milk Like Sugar (Playwrights Horizons and the Women's Project)

Direction: Richard Maxwell Early Plays (The Wooster Group and St. Ann's Warehouse)

Jay Scheib World of Wires (The Kitchen)

Design: Mark Barton, sustained excellence of lighting design

Mimi Lien, sustained excellence of set design

Matt Tierney and Ben Williams, sound design The Select (The Sun Also Rises) (New York Theatre Workshop)

Special Citations: Mark Bennett, Denis O'Hare, Lisa Peterson, & Stephen Spinella An Iliad (New York Theatre Workshop) Erin Courtney & Ken Rus Schmoll A Map of Virtue (13P)

Elevator Repair Service Sustained Excellence Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra No Place to Go (The Public Theater/Joe's Pub) Steven Hoggett, Martin Lowe, & John Tiffany Once (New York Theatre Workshop) Daniel Kitson It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later (St. Ann's Warehouse) Ross Wetzsteon Grant: ($1,000) Youngblood (Ensemble Studio Theatre) Grants: The Bushwick Starr ($2,500) The Debate Society ($2,500) Lifetime Achievement: Caridad Svich

The numbers "Summertime,” performed by Joshua Henry and Sumayya Ali from the cast of Porgy & Bess, and “Raglan Road” performed by David Patrick Kelly from the cast of Once, were entertainment for the evening. The ceremony kicked off with two numbers from newly minted Obie winner Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra from their show No Place to Go.

The Obies were judged by a committee of seven: Brian Parks, Obie Awards Chairman and Arts & Culture editor of The Village Voice; Michael Feingold, chief theater critic for the Voice, two-time Pulitzer finalist, dramaturg, and Obie Chairman Emeritus; Alexis Soloski, a Voice theater critic as well as contributor to The New York Times, the U.K. Guardian, and BBC Radio, plus theater professor at Columbia University; Annie Baker, Best New American Play Obie winner in 2010 for her plays Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens; Anne Kauffman, accomplished director, instructor, and 2007 Obie winner for her direction of The Thugs; José Rivera, two-time Obie Award winner for his plays Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot; and Helen Shaw, a theater critic for Time Out New York and a past Obie judge. Her writing has also appeared in The Village Voice.

Village Voice publisher Josh Fromson, editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, Arts & Culture editor Brian Parks, the judges, the entire marketing and promotion staff of The Village Voice, and the outside staff and volunteers for the 57th Annual Obie Awards all joyously congratulate this year's winners.

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Lurking inside every experimental-theater auteur is a film director itching to light, shoot and edit a movie's every pixel (just ask Richard Foreman, who chucked playwriting for Final Cut and an editing suite). Even though film can be just as collaborative (and compromised) as the stage, cinema dangles the promise of total control. So Jay Scheib is trying to have his cake and eat it, too: In his latest, heavily mediated assemblage, World of Wires, he trails behind his performers with a video camera, feeding strikingly composed, deep-focus images to monitors and screens. Normally, I go to the theater to evaluate language, acting styles and set design; I don't find myself admiring canted close-ups or photojournalistic jitter. Not that ordinary theatrical values aren't also part of the experience. Scheib bases his loopy, spaced-out script on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 television miniseries, Welt am Draht, itself drawn from Daniel F. Galouye's 1962 sci-fi novel, Simulacron-3 (both precursors to such simulation-or-reality works as The Matrix). Plot is never wholly absent from Scheib's plays, but he does his best to blur it under bursts of slapstick, erotic fumbling and cryptic, banal dialogue. His versatile (drop-dead gorgeous) actors balance comic romping with a sharp awareness of the tech jungle they inhabit.

World of Wires is a futuristic corporate murder mystery in which computer scientist Fred Stiller (Jon Morris) helps invent a world-simulating program for his company, Rien, Inc., and then must enter the simulation himself to find out who killed his colleague, Fuller (Sarita Choudhury, who doubles as a hysterical secretary). Tanya Selvaratnam is deadpan-daffy as a CEO with perpetually frizzy hair and a glazed expression. And impish Mikah Ernest Jennings plays Stiller's saucy psychiatrist friend, Franz. Most of the actors take on secondary roles in this twisty story, and if you're confused about who's playing who, then Scheib has driven home his point that reality and identity are contingent and fluid. Visually dazzling and conceptually rich, World of Wires marks the final part of Scheib's mind-bending trilogy, Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems. Now that it's done, let's hope the pioneering Scheib still finds worthwhile subjects in three dimensions.

The Kitchen. Written and directed by Jay Scheib. Based on the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With ensemble cast. 1hr 30mins. No intermission.

Photograph: Paula Court

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Theater Review: Warhol Gets Tweaked in Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) By Scott Brown, 24 January 2012

Gobsquad's 'Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good),' at the Public Theater.

Andy Warhol's 1965 film Kitchen: Is it 70 solid minutes of stoned, half-scripted prattle in a cramped New York City kitchen — or, as Norman Mailer suggested, a mighty prophecy of the culture to come? Or maybe, if you're the witty U.K./German conceptual theater collective Gob Squad, it was just a preview to a great participatory stage experiment. Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good) runs live current through the irony circuit Warhol invented: First the period-bewigged cast members querulously attempt to recapture not just Kitchen, but also Sleep, Blowjob, and other films. (Three discrete projections run concurrently on a giant screen that divides players and crowd.) Then, one by one, they replace themselves with stunned audience conscripts. Many bystanders will get their "fifteen minutes"; some will get quite a bit more.

Stage-and-screen combinations seem to be enjoying a midwinter surge. The recently concluded World of Wires — which I caught lamentably late in its run, and which must return immediately — was theater artist Jay Scheib's latest experiment in "live cinema," where the sets and the blocking serve the sightlines of both a roving camera (operated by Scheib himself) and the audience. (The viewer's attention is split between the screens and the action on stage.) World (based loosely on a seventies Fassbinder TV series about a computer-generated virtual environment) opened with one of the most thrillingly witty displays of illusion I've even seen on a stage or a screen — a genuine challenge to one's fixed notion of reality — and then barreled through another 90 minutes of riveting near anarchy. I'm hereby sending a brain transmission out to some Off Broadway/nonprofit Morpheus: Please, reboot this soon.

Kitchen (You Never Had It So Good) is running at the Public Theater through February 5.

ARTS BEAT The Culture at Large

JANUARY 12, 2012, 5:00 PM Theater Talkback: The Stage, the Screen and the Screen on Stage

By BEN BRANTLEY

Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesIn “Super Night Shot” a film is made outside and then screened indoors.

12:11 p.m. | Updated Can film and theater live happily together in the same room? It’s not as if they haven’t had a long relationship already, with each regularly borrowing stories and stars from the other. But now these separate but equal art forms are attempting to practice cohabitation.

As in many relationships, only half of the couple is truly equipped to make the effort. Film, after all, is recorded action and exists mostly in two dimensions (even when it’s 3-D), which means it can’t invite live theater into its world. On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop theater artists from setting up a projector and showing a movie onstage, letting live performers interact with, or ignore, their two-dimensional equivalents.

Which is what has been happening more and more recently, reflecting the role that recorded reality and screens large and small now play in virtually every aspect of everyday lives. At the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater in New York this month I came upon striking works in which film or video played a significant (and in one case dominant) role, reminding us that, these days, everyone’s potentially a moviemaker.

In “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy,” a rousing meditation on youthful rebellions past and present from the the Italian troupe Motus, video footage and elemental theater existed cheek by jowl. In “Super Night Shot,” the British-German company Gob Squad set itself the task of creating a complete film with hand-held cameras on the streets near the Public Theater within the hour. It then showed that film, unedited, on a Public stage.

There has been some argument as to whether “Super Night Shot” even qualifies as theater. But in its sweaty immediacy and sense of just-displaced reality, it unquestionably feeds the debate about the relationship between screen and stage.

In 1987 the master avant-gardist Richard Foreman presented a work with the bald and declarative title “Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good.” The show’s premise wasn’t hard to figure out: Film, in its literal and detailed representation of the world, leaves little to the imagination, while radio (and by extension, the kind of nonlinear, metaphoric theater that was Mr. Foreman’s specialty) challenges our minds to fill in the blanks.

That doesn’t mean that Mr. Foreman, who has been absent from the theater in recent years, didn’t admit film into his creative sanctuary. An honest-to-gosh movie within the play figured briefly in “Film Is Evil.” And his late-career theatrical works offered parallel universes embodied by eccentrically stylized live performers and more naturalistic-looking, if artificially posed, actors on film.

The stage actors would gaze and paw quizzically at the projected images in the way cats sometimes react to what’s on television. We audience members, in turn, were likely to find both sets of performers equally enigmatic, though in different ways. And pondering that difference was what made these mixed-media chamber pieces so stimulating.

Paula CourtScott Shepherd in the Wooster Group’s production of “Hamlet.”

Such dialogues between live and recorded realities have long been an invigorating part of the modus operandi of the Wooster Group, that eternally vital experimental troupe. Its “House/Lights,” staged in New York in 1999, mixed a Gertrude Stein opera libretto and an obscure vintage bondage movie so thoroughly that dimensions were scrambled beyond distinction.

The ensemble members — particularly, the troupe’s longtime (and incomparable) leading lady, Kate Valk — were so mechanically ritualized in their movements, with voices so layered and distorted by artificial amplification, that their in-the-flesh selves often registered as less “natural” than their on-screen counterparts did. “House/Lights” played wittily and disturbingly on how, in an age of increasingly mixed, attention-fragmenting media, it becomes more and more difficult for us to trust our senses. When I think back on that show, it’s not a specific image of Ms. Valk in person or on screen that I recall so much as some phantasmal, in-between version.

Memory, of course, is what enshrines live theater and gives it more of a mystical, elusive afterglow than film, which you can usually revisit and replay. When in 2007 the Wooster Group took on that Olympus of theater “Hamlet,” it did so by contrasting a grainy 1964 film of a fabled stage production starring Richard Burton with live actors performing the same material, in and out of sync with what was on screen. That production was an oddly affecting evocation of how we remember and preserve the ephemeral art of the stage.

When mainstream theater uses film, it often seems self-conscious and disruptive in ways its creators surely don’t intend. For example filmed sequences using the actors who appeared in Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” (on Broadway in 2006) were used to conjure a sense of place (a traditional British boys’ school) between scenes. And in a generally flawless production by Nicholas Hytner, those video sequences sounded false notes that somehow called into question the self-contained world of the play.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Patrick Wilson as Chris Keller in “All My Sons.”

I felt the same way about Simon McBurney’s 2008 revival of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” which used documentary footage of factory assembly lines and war scenes from the 1940s. But since Mr. McBurney’s production was so theatrically stylized in its acting and its design, the use of film seemed in a way to patronize the play. The suggestion was that we needed to be reminded that the artificial, symbolic activities onstage were emblems of something that had really happened.

On the other hand, Sam Mendes’s touring Anglo-American production of “Richard III,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 4, makes pointed and sardonic use of film in ways familiar to today’s television audiences. As a conniving nobleman determined to capture the crown of England, Richard the politician, played by Kevin Spacey, takes his case to the public via a televised speech, with his videotaped face projected on the stage.

Here you’re aware of the manipulative intelligence of a character, shaping a projected image that both glorifies and disguises. (Knowing Mr. Spacey’s work on both film and stage adds an extra tastiness to our sense of the discrepancies between Richard in two and three dimensions.)

The Belgian director Ivo van Hove — who takes theatrical deconstruction to the point of detonation — uses simulcast video with varying success. He has said his aim is “to make an X-ray of a character,” and a camera would seem the obvious tool for this endeavor. Yet its use in his productions of Molière’s “Misanthrope” and Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes,” both staged at the New York Theater Workshop, felt more decorative than analytical.

On the other hand, the same technique truly enriched his adaptation of the John Cassavetes movie “Opening Night,” a portrait of the necessarily divided identities of actors in performance. The projected images in this show, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, became a natural reflection of the doubleness of both acting itself and the experience of being an audience member.

For the interdisciplinary auteur Jay Scheib mixing media is as much a socio-philosophical statement as an aesthetic one. His “World of Wires,” seen this month at the Kitchen in New York, follows the descent of one brave computer techie into an alternative, digitally simulated universe. Based on a 1973 television series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “World of Wires” shares the high- tech political paranoia of more recent films like “The Matrix.”

It seems to ask, with equal measures of wonder and anxiety (and, thank heaven, a sense of humor) that favorite collegiate question “What if the reality we’re living in has been created by somebody else?” Mr. Scheib was his own cameraman for this production, trailing his actors and turning them into on-screen simulacra before our eyes. The show pulled off some nifty trompe l’oeil effects. But its most startling and convincing moments — like the collapse of a wall into the laps of audience members — were not cinematic but purely theatrical.

Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSilvia Calderoni, rear, and Benno Steinegger in the Under the Radar Festival production of “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy.”

Ultimately of course every artistic representation of reality is imperfect. And one of the things I loved about “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy” was its awareness of such limitations. An impressionistic analysis of the student rebellions in Greece in 2008, following the killing of a 15-year-old boy by a policeman, “Alexis” featured both documentary videotape and in-the-moment Method-style acting sessions (portraying scenes from Sophocles’ “Antigone”), as well as boundary-melting sequences that instantly translated live action into frozen photographic images.

All these representations were deliberately and consistently undermined by the Motus troupe. Heated exchanges from “Antigone” would turn into arguments between the performers playing Sophocles’ characters. And the computer-projected footage would regularly be shrunk into near invisibility or shown on surfaces that mottled and warped the images.

These distortions suggested, to me at least, how hard it is to capture what people feel in times of crisis. Our awareness and suspicions of the inexactitude of art are heightened in those moments when apocalypse seems to threaten.

The New Yorker, Jan 23, 2012 http://archives.newyorker.com/global/print.asp?path=/djvu/Con...

1 of 1 1/16/12 10:19 AM BELLONA.DESTROYER OF CITIES

By Philippa Wehle

Photo 1: The Kitchen, New York. Captain Kamp (Tanya Selvaratnam) on a final mission through the smoke and haze of Bellona. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

estroyer of Cities, is like a performance by a take everything in, but isn’t this just what Scheib is aiming talking dog. (The audience finds) it so cunning for? He has been engaged in a search for new ways to mix Dthat he speaks at all, they couldn’t care less what he theatre, dance and video for some time now and these actually says.” (49) This quote from Bellona, Destroyer of include an emphasis on live action. Cities, adapted by Jay Scheib after Samuel R. Delany’s epic At first he experimented with naturalism using actors science fiction novel Dhalgren refers to the poems written and live cameras in order to “get as close to reality” as by Kid, a mysterious newcomer to the city of Bellona, possible, to play real people. He filmed them going about whose writings are puzzling as well as fascinating. They their lives, and then cut the footage and projected it during conjure a dark urban world, an autumnal city past its prime performances. He called this period, from 2003 to 2007, with desiccated streets and crumbling walls that rearrange “The Flight Out of Naturalism.” It was his first “makeshift themselves. Roger Caulkins, a publisher, is impressed with season” (a term he has coined to capture his trajectory Kid’s poems and wants to publish them. Lanya, who, in as an independent theatre artist) and it included nine Scheib’s play, is already a published writer says that Kid’s productions dealing with the collision of fiction and reality poems are over-emotional and dull, and anyway, she tells in the theatre. With his production of Tennessee Williams’s Kid, most people are content to just hear about them, not read them. Like the talking dog performance, they are only Philippa Wehle is Professor Emerita of French Language interested in the spectacle that surrounds their publication. and Culture and Drama Studies at Purchase College, In his Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, Scheib confronts this SUNY. She writes widely on contemporary theatre and dilemma head on: how to get an audience to see past the performance and is the author of Le Théâtre populaire spectacle and appreciate the poetry of the piece? Scheib’s selon Jean Vilar, Drama Contemporary: France, and stage designs are so enticing, his use of live video streaming, Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. She has and freeze frame video projections, so visually alluring that translated numerous contemporary French language plays the audience may sometimes miss the important issues that and is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She is Scheib raises. [Photo 2] His plays may seem at times to currently working on a translation of Stéphanie Bérard’s be overly chaotic or too densely packed for audiences to Théâtres des Antilles : traditions et scènes contemporaines.

26 TheatreForum Demolition Downtown in 2007, he used a three camera live- of Kid in Bellona is actually the young girl who arrives feed video installation, switching from close-ups to other at the end of the novel as Kid is leaving. She might be a perspectives in order to capture and magnify intimate perfect repetition of Kid and the events would happen moments in the characters’ lives. Scheib also experimented over and over again (Scheib 29 Aug. 2011). with repeated dance movements. In one scene, for example, Scheib has been passionate about Dhalgren for years. his performers (a couple with serious marital problems) He once taught an entire course on the book at MIT and wrestle and fall over and over again, like a film being played adapted it into a play at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria backwards and forwards. (in German; he is fluent). At first he dreamed of creating a In his current season (2007 to the present) “Simulated show that would go on for almost a week and transform an Cities/Simulated Systems,” a trilogy of science vs. fiction entire neighborhood (in downtown Detroit) into the city performance works of which Bellona, Destroyer of Cities is of Bellona, with Teddy’s Bar and its buildings going up in the second, Scheib continues to investigate ways of using flames, then returning to their original state and bursting emerging technologies and multiple perspectives to capture into flame again. The cost of a ticket would have included a what he refers to as the “phrases, gestures, exaggerations, hotel room for a week, or the audience could have chosen to surprises, and mood changes that mirror life’s sleep in the park like Kid. There would have been classes on unpredictability” (Scheib 23 Aug. 2011). “Motion theater” urbanism, poetry, and electrical engineering. The audience (his current term for his special style of theatre) aims to be a would even have moved furniture for Mrs. Richards. total theatre experience composed of live action, film, video, Of course this was not feasible, but Scheib did not give poetry, and dance. up on the idea of making a theatre piece out of Dhalgren. He Scheib is a playwright who believes in writing directly on spent close to two years working on the show to find ways the stage in close collaboration with his actors, set designers, to compress Delany’s labyrinthine vision into 100 minutes costume designers, and video designers. Together they work of live theatre for a proscenium stage. His Bellona, Destroyer to tell contemporary tales using contemporary means through of Cities has gone through many changes since 2009 improvisations and frequent rewrites, live and on camera. The (actually more than 20 manuscripts) and it would seem that written script is the result of this ongoing conversation and he is considering the possibility of still further revisions. as one can imagine it changes frequently, even up to the last There is much that comes from Dhalgren, location, minute. Referring to the rowdy multilayered Gang Bang scene characters’ names and the general aura of a crumbling city, in Bellona, for example, Scheib agrees that “once the spectacle for example, but there are important differences. Kid, the takes off, there is much that escapes the audience…. It is hippy hero of Dhalgren, who has lost his memory, is played definitely part of the talking dog routine” but, he adds, “even by a woman in Bellona. There are passages from the novel, the most chaotic moments are wildly crafted, and when the performance settles, t h e s e m o m e n t s usually fall into a stable system” (Scheib 23 Aug. 2011). The story Scheib and his team are telling in Bellona is not so much an adaptation of Delany’s novel as it is a re-imagining of Dhalgren or even a continuation of Delany’s near 900 page monumental epic. It is like another draft of Photo 2: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Multiple cameras present multiple perspectives. As Jack Dhalgren, according (Jon Morris) and Tak (Caleb Hammond) get it on in the w.c. of Teddy’s Bar, Paul Fenster (top, Mikéah to Scheib who believes that it Ernest Jennings) listens in as Lanya (Ayesha Ngaujah) and Kid (Sarita Choudhury) discuss the ins and outs of publishing poetry. is possible that the character Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib

TheatreForum 27 city down. Others say that a race riot broke out after a noted black activist was shot by a white supremacist and the city was burned in protest. Or is it “because,” as Tak says, “we could not find one single solitary decent person anywhere” (9). The reference to Sodom and Gomorrah is clear. Bellona seems to be a sin city where deviant sexual practices may be one of the reasons for the city’s destruction. No one seems to know the truth. What can the citizens of Bellona do in the midst of such anarchy? Enjoy unbridled sex and hang out at Teddy’s Bar where all the drinks are free and customers can talk freely about any subject they like. Photo 3: Maison des Arts, Créteil. Mrs. Richards (Tanya Selvaratnam) looks for just the right dress. Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, takes the form of a series of loosely connected scenes. These scenes have titles in Scheib’s script such as but they are not always verbatim even though they may Captain Kamp Gives A Talk About Mars In A seem to be. Scenes from the novel are “very sewn together— Bar, Gang Bang, Mrs. Richards/Mr. Richards, All The New scenes from opposite ends of the novel are regularly spliced People Meet Tak, Kid and Lanya In The Park, June Might together, and characters are melded” (Scheib). Bellona, Even Be Pregnant, The Richards Meet Kid, Elevator Death Destroyer of Cities premiered at The Kitchen in New York Scene, and so on. They read almost like a storyboard for a City on 1 April 2010 moved on to the EXIT Festival at film or a TV sitcom about the Richards family, a “typical” Creteil, France, in March 2011 and was reprised in Boston middle-class family (mom, dad, and their two teenage kids), at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in May 2011. who live in an apartment building in a large city, surrounded As in Dhalgren, Bellona is a decimated city located by random violence and disintegrating facades. Scheib somewhere in mid-America, a city in ruins, whose considered making Bellona into a TV series. “It would be a inhabitants are doomed to either relive or revive the scary journey,” he says. “Each season ends with Kid leaving, catastrophes that are destroying their city. Once a thriving and a new Kid coming in . . . and the same thing happens all metropolis of two million people, only about 1,000 are left over again with some differences” (Scheib 23 Aug. 2011). to find their way among the smoldering ruins where lawless Despite the confusion, the Richards are trying to keep gangs rule the streets. The entire city constantly shifts, up appearances, especially Mrs. Richards. She is doing her turns, and readjusts itself. Buildings and walls collapse and best to hold on to her idea of what is acceptable but she is burn then put themselves back together again. The city is fast coming unhinged and barely manages to behave like “in a revolving state of busted,” according to Tak Loufer, the proper Mistress of the House (when she invites Kid an industrial engineer who seems to know the most about who’s been living in the park, to have a seat, she quickly Bellona (9). The sun is increasingly huge and two moons puts newspapers down so as not to soil her already dirty have suddenly appeared in the sky. None of the clocks work. In a word, the city is slowly being erased. Despite the chaos, there is a daily newspaper. Its dates have nothing to do with actual time but then time seems to be running backwards in Bellona. As Tak says “I go down a street: buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They’re still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backward here. Or sideways” (46). Nobody seems to remember how such a disaster occurred. Rumor has it that a black man raped an underage girl and Photo 4: Maison des Arts, Créteil. George Harrison (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) reads that to get even, some people burned the from Kid's book in the final moments. Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib

28 TheatreForum white sofa) and she is very concerned Photo 5: Maison des Arts, Créteil. 3D rendering of the scenic design with Kid at her about wearing the right dress for the book party. Courtesy of scenic desinger, Peter Ksander. occasion even though there is no special occasion. [Photo 3] Mrs. Richards is so afraid to go out of the apartment that she sends her children out to get food and the newspaper. Arthur, the father, an engineer who works for Maitland Systems Engineering, pretends to go to work every morning, but does his office still exist? His keys aren’t even his keys, but it doesn’t really matter because the door doesn’t lock. June, their teenage daughter, has been raped and may be pregnant. She is so on edge she can barely breathe. Bobby, age 14, is a typical teenager fighting with his sister and are published writers – Lanya in The New Yorker, Kid in a excited by girls but he dresses in a very strange outfit (skirt book published by Caulkins. and sweat jacket with hood) and seems unduly hyperkinetic. This is not to say that their roles are not defined; The pressure is building to an intolerable point. This family but given the fast pace of the action and the rapid-fire is about to explode. dialogue, it is not always easy for the audience to follow The other characters in Bellona are an intriguing bunch. their discourse. For Scheib, this is part of his ongoing Captain Kamp, an astronaut who has just returned from project to emphasize physical action in his plays, and to Mars, drops in at Teddy’s Bar to check out Bellona, and put some of life’s unruliness in the room. “There is often never appears again. There is Teddy himself; Kid, the this assumption that I am not interested in the text,” enigmatic newcomer who can’t remember her past and says Scheib, “Text for me is extremely important—but who wants to be a writer; Nightmare and Dragon Lady, without everything else the text will be boring, flat, and ringleaders of the Scorpions, a gang of ruffians who live uninteresting” (Scheib 23 Aug. 2011). below the Richards and who enjoy frightening them; Lanya, To play Bellona’s intriguing characters, Scheib turned to a published writer who falls in love with Kid; Paul Fenster, some of his regular collaborators, Sarita Choudhury (Kid), a black activist; Tak Loufer, a white army deserter from the Tanya Selvaratnam (Captain Kamp and Mrs. Richards), South; George Harrison, a mythical figure, “a huge black Mikéah Ernest Jennings (Paul, George Harris, and Nightmare), buck” whose naked picture is everywhere; Eddie, who is Caleb Hammond (Tak, Mr. Richards), Jon Morris (Bobby June and Bobby’s brother; Risa, and Jack. [Photo 4] and Jack), Ayesha Ngaryah, (Lanya and Dragonlady), and These are not fully drawn, rounded dramatic characters Natalie Thomas (June and Teddy). His performers are from in any traditional sense, nor should they be in Scheib’s varied backgrounds (dance, performance, circus, film, and brand of action packed theatre. Mrs. Richards, Kid, Paul acting) and they are all required to perform their roles with Fenster, Tak Loufer, and George Harrison are the major players in this dystopia. Others seem to appear in flashes (June dancing around in the bathroom, Bobby rushing by, Jack walking through a wall), or they change identities. In the version of Bellona that played at the Maison des Arts in Créteil, the same actress played Teddy and June, another played Lanya and Dragonlady. A male actor played both Tak and Mr. Richards, and another played Paul Fenster, George Harrison, and Nightmare. Some of Scheib’s characters are also doubles, “alloys” as he calls them. Tak and Mr. Richards are both engineers; Tak, the more liberated one, Mr. Richards, an Photo 6: The Institute Contemporary Art/Boston. Mrs. Richards is projected larger than life via closed-circuit T.V. as she tries to hold it together while her daughter June (Natalie uptight man hiding behind a façade. Lanya Thomas) is left to fend for herself in Teddy’s Bar in the final moments. and Kid are also overlapping entities. Both Photo: Sara Brown

TheatreForum 29 cameras as tools to direct our attention to moments that might be lost, or heighten our awareness of multiple realities or just to create a fractured sense of reality” (16). In the center of Bellona’s stage (or off to stage left, depending on which version of Bellona is being referenced) is a very tall, large, rectangular screen on which streaming and freeze frame video projections replicate the onstage action, sometimes using split screens, sometimes using full screens. [Photo 5] Faces are magnified so that expressions, which the audience may not be able to decipher, are easily read on the large screen. In Scheib’s words: “I use cameras in the same way that most people use microphones—to see closer, louder, to see around corners” (Crawford 8). This technique is especially rewarding. [Photo 6] We get to see the details of Mrs. Richards’s fear as she spins around in nervous reaction to the Scorpions hammering on her door, or we experience the full impact of Bobby’s blood-soaked body lying on the bottom of the elevator shaft. [Photo 7] As Bellona begins, Captain Kamp, an astronaut in full space regalia floats onto the set, held aloft by two cast members who have trouble keeping her in space. [Photo 1] She manages to walk over to Teddy’s Bar on her own, none the worse for wear even though she has just returned from Mars. (Is this a nod to Scheib’s first installment of his trilogy, Untitled Mars: This Title May Change, that played at P.S. 122, in April 2008?) No one seems Photo 7 (top) : The Kitchen, New York. Bobby (Jon Morris) after plunging a dozen or more surprised that she is there asking for a floors to his death. drink and sharing her experience with Kid, Photo 8: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Kid and Jack take turns with Risa (Ayesha Teddy, Tak, Nightmare, Jack, and Risa. Ngaujah) in the opening scenes. Video stills courtesy of Jay Scheib. Soon the conversation lags and the gang incredible physicality. He expects them to push their bodies rushes over to stage left where mattresses to the extreme. They are amazing to watch on Peter Ksander’s are brought out and clothes are thrown off as couples of all inventive set composed of sliced buildings and multiple rooms varieties participate in what looks like an all out, full-fledged through which they must run, jump, smash through walls, orgy, doing “freaky things” that are magnified on the giant and swirl about without hurting themselves (not always the screen. [Photo 8]It may appear to be hardcore porn but case according to Scheib). They move quickly from Teddy’s in fact, their romp is carefully choreographed and totally Bar (located stage right) to the Richards’ living room with its simulated. According to Scheib: “It was fake. It was meant cracked walls (stage left). In between there is a much-used to be fake. It was meant to celebrate fake.” They are clearly bathroom, and there are glimpses of other rooms in the back. laughing and having a good time, enjoying shouting out Scheib is much praised for his striking scenic designs (in their preferences and even stopping to read passages from Bellona, Destroyer of Cities he collaborated with Peter Ksander Destroyer of Cities. There is so much going on at once, that and Josh Higgason) and his daring use of contemporary much can be missed, or misinterpreted (in Créteil, Scheib technologies. As Andy Horwitz writes in CultureBot: “He is was told that this scene was so risqué that there should have one of the few directors who really seems to know how to been a warning posted). [Photo 9] blend performative and cinematic vocabularies, using video There are several interconnecting plotlines in Bellona.

30 TheatreForum Photo 9: Maison des Arts, Créteil. Jack and Kid talk about These are intriguing getting it on as Tak struggles out of his leather pants. pairings: Kid, a hippy who Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib may well have been in an asylum, with Lanya, who seems a more settled person; and June with George Harrison (it turns out that June was not raped after all and that she now wants to be with him). What Paul and Tak share may not be love in any traditional sense, but as Tak says, his feelings for Paul are very complex. [Photo 10] Their relationship is not just a flirtation. Mr. and Mrs. Richards, on the other hand, have a conventional marriage. Mrs. Richards lives in her world of cooking, cleaning, and her three children. Clearly, one of the themes of Bellona is that in a They are not always clear-cut or definitive versions of world falling apart, new and different relationships emerge what is actually going on. Along with the disintegration of that can provide alternative ways of living in the future. the Richards family, (Bobby is pushed down the elevator Racial issues are also dealt with in Bellona. Is the city in such shaft by his sister June, and Mrs. Richards goes berserk a state because a black man raped an underage white girl and with grief), there is the story of Kid who supposedly finds this started a race-fueled riot? Or did race riots occur because a notebook with writing in it. She adds another layer to an important black activist (Paul Fenster) was shot by a white the mythology behind the mysterious book, composing supremacist? Tak and Paul’s heated dialogue about what it her own poems that end up being published in a book means to be black is an important moment in the play. Tak entitled Destroyer of Cities. Lanya, also a writer, is actually claims that his soul is black because he is gay and alienated. Paul the one who found the notebook and gave it to Kid, and boasts that he can imitate white people really well and that Tak they become lovers. There is the story of Paul Fenster, a can only have a black soul when Paul tells him he can have one. black activist who is attracted to Tak Loufer, a former white Their discussion raises interesting questions about the shifting supremacist; and there is the much talked about George H a r r i s o n , a l a r g e r t h a n Photo 10: Maison des Arts, Créteil. Tak (Caleb Hammond) is a disillusioned white supremacist who is falling in love with l i f e b l a c k activist Paul Fenster (Mikéah Ernest Jennings). intellectual, who Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib is accused of raping a young white girl (most likely June). Roger Caulkins has published a huge naked p h o t o g r a p h of him along w i t h a n unexpurgated interview in which Harrison tells how good the rape was.

TheatreForum 31 Photo 11: Maison des Arts, Créteil. Nightmare (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) and Dragonlady (Ayesha Ngaujah) turn on each other under the immense stress of Bobby’s violent death. Video still courtesy of Jay Scheib.

roles they might end up realizing in Bellona. Their discourse, Selvaratnam--his producer, lead actress, and wife. In 2009, along with that of Kid, George, June, and Jack, is designed to he was listed as the “Best New York Theatre Director” subvert ideologies of rightness (Crawford 10). by Time Out New York and named one of the 25 theatre Class issues are raised as well. Nightmare and Dragonlady artists who will shape the next 25 years of American (both African American) inhabit a world that is totally the theatre by American Theatre Magazine. He received a opposite world from the Richards. They are rogues who Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, but like so many other roam the streets terrifying the citizens of Bellona. [Photo 11] American experimental artists, he too struggles for It is suggested in the play that their outrage comes from the funding and recognition. Most importantly, perhaps, for dichotomy between their place in society and the entitled an independent theatre artist, Scheib enjoys the enviable upper class (the Richards). They are at opposite ends of a position of Associate Professor of Music and Theatre Arts spectrum of race and class, “the photo negative of Mr. and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has Mrs. Richards.” (Scheib 29 Aug. 2011) They cannot allow many opportunities to do his research and develop new themselves the privilege of screaming their grief publically as work with his colleagues and students. Mrs. Richards does at the loss of her son. They would receive no empathy from the social order represented by the Richards. SOURCES “These (issues) are powerful themes in American History,” Crawford, Ashley. “Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren Lives On.” says Scheib, “and neither are pretty and neither are taken out 21C Magazine. 9 June 2010. all that often and thoroughly inspected” (Scheib 29 Aug. 2011). Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. New York: Bantam, 1975. Scheib is currently working on World of Wires, which is Horwitz, Andy. “Jay Scheib’s Bellona at The Kitchen.” the final installment of his trilogy “Simulated Cities/Simulated Culturebot Arts + Culture+Ideas. 3 April 2010. Systems.” Loosely inspired by Daniel Galouye’s science fiction Scheib, Jay. Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, adapted from masterpiece Simulacron-3 and Fassbinder’s sci-fi television Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren. Unpublished series Welt am Draht, it is about a computer simulation that is playscript. Draft 24. 1–50. so real that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the Scheib, Jay. Message to Philippa Wehle. 23 Aug. 2011. fiction of the simulation and reality. It will premiere in New E-mail. York City at The Kitchen in January 2012. Scheib, Jay. Message to Philippa Wehle. 29 Aug. 2011. A prolific theatre and video artist, Scheib is frequently E-mail. invited to direct and design plays, operas, and installations by others; in his own work he collaborates with Tanya

32 TheatreForum The best New York theater directors - Time Out New York

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1. Jay Scheib Mixing multimedia with deadpan-cool (and very sexy) actors, Scheib is forging new ways of seeing drama.

2. Ken Rus Schmoll Schmoll takes on more difficult playwrights, teasing out the ambiguity and menace in their words.

3. Elizabeth LeCompte As chief engineer of the Wooster Group’s postmodern tech spectacles, she has influenced a generation of experimenters.

4. Anne Kauffman She helmed two of our favorite shows in years: The Thugs and God’s Ear. Sensitive to thorny language, she makes the murky crystal clear. Cheap tickets 5. Joe Mantello Seats for a song Sure, he helmed the blockbuster Wicked, but the former actor is most at home Find great deals on working on tough drama on an intimate level. tickets. 6. Richard Foreman Guides They don’t call him the king of the avant-garde for nothing; Foreman is the auteur’s Student Guide auteur: He writes, designs, directs and even operates the sound. Practical (and frivolous) 7. Robert Woodruff advice for the scholarly. It’s criminal how little he works in the city, but when he does, we’re transfixed by the Real Estate Guide On the blogs elegant brutality of his cool tableaux. Score a great deal. Visitors Guide 8. Stephen Daldry Everything you need to get Without this bold British director (of stage and screen), Billy Elliot wouldn’t have been The cast of Hair the most out of NYC. nearly so magical. comes out for Continuing Education Never stop learning. 9. Julie Taymor marriage » We’re waiting for a follow-up as impressive as The Lion King, but until then, we’ll still A one-man remake of get weepy over "Circle of Life." Offers First » 10. Bartlett Sher Nightlife + Puppetry of the Penis: This guy can do everything: old-fashioned musicals like South Pacific and great Get real-time information for open » bars, clubs and restaurants drama like Awake and Sing! He’s a treasure. on your mobile. Irena's Vow takes liberties Prizes & promotions with a Holocaust » Win prizes and get discounts, event invites and more. Free flix Comments | Leave a comment Get free tickets to hot new movie releases. No comments yet. Click here and be the first! The TONY Lounge Stop by for a drink at our bar in midtown Manhattan. Video Subscribe Subscribe now and save 90%!

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http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/theater/72875/the-best-new-york-theater-directors[4/6/09 5:02:35 PM]

JAY SCHEIB in his MIT studio. His multimedia work “BELLONA, DESTROYER OF CITIES,’’ based on the novel “Dhalgren,’’ is part of the Emerging America festival. Photo credit: JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

Taking a sci-fi tale to the stage in ‘Bellona’ Laura Collins-Hughes The Boston Globe May 13, 2011 ET

BELLONA, DESTROYER OF CITIES At: Institute of Contemporary Art, through May 15. Tickets: $25, $22 students. 617-478-3103, www.icaboston.org

CAMBRIDGE — The first time director Jay Scheib read “Dhalgren,’’ Samuel R. Delany’s cult-classic science fiction novel, it took him nearly a year. The dense and looping text sprawls to almost 900 pages in the original edition, but length was not the obstacle. The speed bump he kept hitting was something he had thrown in his own path: the decision, made before he had ever finished the book, that he would adapt it into a theater piece.

“This is maybe a terrible admission, but it’s sort of how I read a lot of things — because you read it very differently when what you’re planning to do is to engage with the material,’’ Scheib, a boyish 41, said on a recent afternoon in his studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is an associate professor of theater.

Finally, Scheib skipped to the last chapter — “which kind of blew my mind,’’ he said. It also explained to him much that he hadn’t grasped about Delany’s 1975 novel, set in a post-cataclysmic urban landscape once inhabited by millions, now peopled by only a few thousand stragglers. Bellona is the name of the American city in “Dhalgren’’; it is also the name of the Roman goddess of war.

Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe, May 13, 2011 ET 1

“Bellona, Destroyer of Cities,’’ the theater piece Scheib made from the book, opens tonight at the Institute of Contemporary Art, part of the weekend-long Emerging America festival. A highly physical, multimedia production, it embraces the issues of race and sexuality that fuel Delany’s labyrinthine narrative. “It’s rated R,’’ Scheib said.

“Bellona,’’ which premiered a year ago at the Kitchen in New York, is the second work in a science fiction trilogy Scheib is developing. He has had the cooperation of Delany, the 69-year-old “Dhalgren’’ author, throughout the creation of “Bellona.’’

“The fundamental dramatic structure of ‘Dhalgren’ is to take ordinary society and then remove a large chunk of it and see what is left,’’ Delany explained by phone from New York. “Money is one of the things that is removed in ‘Dhalgren,’ and a certain kind of social ability to enforce social laws is also removed. What will happen?

“The quick assumption many people have is that we’ll, you know, devolve into chaos. Well, I think that takes a little bit of time, and I think people bring their expectations of what life should be like even into a situation like that.’’

For Delany, who has already seen “Dhalgren’’ adapted into an opera, allowing Scheib to make theater from it was partly a matter of aesthetic curiosity. Even so, he wants to make sure that the result is recognizable to him, that it jibes with what his 31-year-old self was trying to communicate in the novel that he spent five years writing.

Scheib is scheduled to take part in a post-show conversation tomorrow night with Delany, whom he called a very tough and very good critic. When the novelist gives him notes after a rehearsal, Scheib said, he puts 75 percent of them directly into the show — and yes, he added, that is a high proportion.

At MIT, where he made “Dhalgren’’ the subject of a course he taught, Scheib inhabits a studio that was once a squash court. Its high wooden walls are covered with photographs and blueprints from theater and opera productions he has made in this country and in Europe.

Video cameras and monitors are scattered throughout the space, the tools of a director whose work borrows from an array of disciplines and typically combines live action with video. Scheib’s “This Place Is a Desert,’’ seen at the ICA in 2007, was one such excursion.

“I keep threatening, like, oh, ‘The next couple things that I do will have no media whatsoever: no sound, one light cue,’ ’’ said Scheib, who last month won a Guggenheim Fellowship that is meant to support the completion of his trilogy.

But listen to him talk about people’s diminishing attention spans — he prefers to think of them as faster attention spans — or about the usefulness of video in the context of black-box theater architecture, and the absence of cameras onstage seems like an empty threat for the moment. “For me, a video frame is essentially just another proscenium,’’ he said. “It’s a way of getting a hold once again of the visual aspect of performance, in a way which makes use of a vocabulary which culturally we know so well.’’ Using that technology in “Bellona,’’ Scheib lends a new, 21st-century form to “Dhalgren,’’ a work that its author described as “very much a novel of the 1970s.’’ “As many people have said, there’s nothing that dates faster than science Fiction,’’ Delany said. “And the fact that ‘Dhalgren’ has actually managed to intrigue people for this long I think makes me a very, very lucky writer.’’ That it has not dated, Scheib said, is because the questions it raises about race and sexuality are still with us. “I think this novel should be no longer politically relevant, but it is,’’ he said. “It could’ve been written this morning.’’

Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at [email protected].

Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe, May 13, 2011 ET 2

March 24-30, 2010

April 5, 2010

21C Magazine http://www.21cmagazine.com/

DDhhaallggrreenn:: TThhee CCiittyy TThhaatt NNeevveerr SSlleeeeppss

Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren as both book and theatre. by Ashley Crawford, June 9, 2010

Still from Jay Scheib's Bellona, Destroyer of Cities. Image Source: JayScheib.com

Dhalgren is one of the monoliths of 20th Century literature and Samuel R. Delany (known as Chip to his mates) is one of the demi-Gods of science ﬁction, standing alongside Ballard, Burroughs and Dick as one of the true innovators of speculative ﬁction. Blurbing the 2001 edition of this 1974 epic, Jonathan Lethem stated that: “Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost 30 years. It’s beauty and force still seem to be growing.”

William Gibson, in his introduction to the same edition, described Dhalgren as “a prose-city, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors. Once established in memory, it comes to have the feel of a climate, a season. It turns there, on the mind’s horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity, a tidal force urging the reader’s re-entry. It is a literary singularity. It is a work of sustained conceptual daring, executed by the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science ﬁction.”

One can see hints of Dhalgren’s post-apocalyptic city of Bellona, with it’s dark, noir-ish shadows and rusting girders, in Gibson’s Virtual Light, in Lethem’s Chronic City, in Steve Erickson’s Los Angeles in The Sea Came in at Midnight and in Jack O’Connell’s city of Quinsigamond. Indeed in a recent 21•C interview with O’Connell he states: “I know the moment I ﬁrst heard of the book: I can recall standing at a summer party, entranced as a well-read, likeminded pal told me of this 800-page epic that was a complete head trip. I recall this friend telling me about the book suddenly splitting into two columns of type. I bought it immediately – still have that original Bantam paperback edition with that wonderful cover art of the ruined city. As I wrote a couple of years ago in an e-mail to Delany: there’s a chance I may be the only person to have read large chunks of the novel in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, on a stalled train, while people painted entirely blue tried to hand steamed ears of corn to me through the windows… So, yes, Dhalgren has been an inﬂuence.”

Delany’s adventurous spirit with typography can also, no doubt, be seen in works by Erickson, David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

And then, in 2010, a man of either questionable sanity or immense courage, Jay Scheib, attempted to bring this tome of experimental literature to the stage and, astonishingly, succeeded. The 100-minute production, Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, debuted at The Kitchen in New York.

The New York Times reviewer noted that: “[set designer] Peter Ksander has constructed a vertical, multi-chambered complex (an apartment building? a city? a mind?), creating a sense of ruined lives stacked one on top of the next. ‘It’s like a chessboard,’ as one resident says, and it’s hard to tell who’s winning or what the stakes might be. The structure’s dingy architecture alternately frames and conceals its feral inhabitants’ erotic, violent actions, which swirl around an enigmatic newcomer, Kid (the marvelous Sarita Choudhury)…. what an engrossing world Mr. Scheib and his ﬁne ensemble have created. Tanya Selvaratnam’s elegantly mad housewife is a subversive delight, seeming sometimes to belong to another play entirely, and Mikéah Ernest Jennings’s navigation of racial stereotypes is slyly sophisticated.”

New York Time Out described Bellona, Destroyer of Cities as “a passport to a thoroughly convincing alternate world – one that

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seems to weirdly overlay our vision even as we stumble outside onto the suddenly unfamiliar concrete of far west 19th Street.”

It seemed time to have a glass of wine with Scheib and Delany at Bellona’s infamous bar, Teddy’s, where the drinks are eternally free. This seemed like a good idea until I suggested to Mr Delany that Dhalgren’s fame may have been fractionally stymied by its categorization as ‘science ﬁction’ at which stage I received a no doubt well-deserved tongue lashing.

Jay, what in the world gave you the courage to attempt to visualize the world of Bellona?

Jay Sheib: Leap ﬁrst, look later.

The visual experience is a rich one and really what hooked me – that along with the poetry and especially the poetry that left image behind, or scrambled image such that its visual aspect was no longer relevant.

My ﬁrst impulse was to make a perfect 1:1 simulation of the novel. I proposed a production that would last for six or seven days and would actually transform a real neighborhood into my own vision of Bellona –complete with a Teddy’s bar, a convenience store that would restock itself nightly, buildings and streets that would rearrange themselves, astronauts giving talks about space travel would show up with slide-shows. The price of a ticket would of course include a hotel room, and the audience would have to go on runs to get something to eat. Audience members needing jobs could move furniture for Mrs. Richards, or dig holes in the park. We had imagined doing it in a neighborhood in downtown Detroit, but actually any city would do. What can I say, it is forever difﬁcult to know what you are getting yourself into until well after you are well into it.

We ended up in a theater. And ended up compressing this gigantic vision into a small room. But living inside of the material of Dhalgren – even in a smaller room never disappointed.

I set out to make a performance that would be inspired by Dhalgren, but which would be primarily about urban planning and design. I had envisioned it as something of a science vs. ﬁction foray into the evolution of conceptual civil engineering. Of course I ended up somewhere else entirely – I ended up with a play that was much more about people than about buildings.

We will be presenting the work again in a year at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. It’s an unusual theater which looks out on Boston harbour, presenting a whole range of compositional challenges and unusual possibilities. The clock is ticking and I am working with two engineers at MIT to solve some pretty steep engineering problems (i.e., the scorpion shields, a building that could burn and then suddenly not have burned, orchids, etc.).

The next iteration of the work will be something of an extension of what we have learned, but it is also possible that it will be a completely different experience, and look like a completely different production. A year is a long time. Hard to know who I will be in a year.

What did you think, Chip? Did he pull it off?

CHIP DELANY: That kind of monumental theater that Jay is describing can be really interesting. I remember, more than a decade ago, an evening-long piece called Tamara, which was about Mussolini’s house arrest of the great Italian poet, Gabriel D’Anunzio. It was an epic with 30 odd actors and characters that took over the whole of the Park Avenue Armory and was performed upstairs on the second floor, on the ground floor, and in the basement, and the audience had an elaborate buffet dinner in the midst of it. Through the evening, the audience went from room to room, and you could only follow one story line a night. I went back to see it five times. Quickly that approach devolved into comedy, however, with Tina and Tony’s Wedding, which used the same idea – an actual dinner as part of the show – for farce. It had a few giggles, but no real theatrical weight.

I’m actually rather glad things got down to reasonable proportions by the time you mounted Bellona. If somebody is going to mount a creative piece that takes off from another creative piece, which is what Jay and Tanya have done, if you have any sense you don’t expect certain things to happen. You don’t look for that exact 1:1 photographic reproduction, faithful in every detail, of the inspiring piece. Dhalgren is a near 900 page novel. The show is an hour, an hour and a half. I talked to a few people afterward, who hadn’t seen it, and the ﬁrst thing they asked was: “Hey, how did they do the Scorpions?” And I said, “Basically, they left them out.”

They looked crestfallen: for them the scorpions were their favorite part of the book. But Bellona is a piece of live theater, and a proscenium theater at that, not a multi-million dollar CGI ﬁlm. Within those conﬁnes, Jay, Tanya, and the other actors mounted a really interesting evening. My sense was very much that most of the audience felt much as I did. So, yes, they pulled it off, swimmingly if your expectations are organized around reasonable parameters.

I was a bit surprised, nay, stunned, Jay, to see that the Kid had a sex change. Was that your idea or Samuel’s? That would seem to cut into the homoerotic edge of Dhalgren somewhat – was that a concern?

JS: In my ﬁrst outing with the material, at the Mozarteum in Austria, the role of Kid was played by a guy and the sexuality played out much as in the novel. When we started in New York we began, again, with the same setup. Kid was played as a guy. But in the beginning of that rehearsal period we made a lot of compositional improvisations and my continued work on the material moved our thinking in a different direction.

So, the decision was 50 per cent about having loved what Sarita Choudhury was doing with the character during our rehearsals and 50 per cent about what happens in the last three pages of the book. For me, the feeling of arriving at the last three pages is so deeply moving, and sort of heartbreaking in a nausea-inspiring, multiplicity-of-perspective kind of way.

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Dragon Lady, Kid, and Glass and a few others are on their way out of the city and they meet a woman who is on her way in. Who this woman is and who she is going to become immediately colonized my reading of the novel. Everything illuminated. Delany describes her as “dark Oriental,” and well, off we go. She was maybe about to become the Kid again. Maybe the same but different from the last time. She was going to wander into the city with Kid’s orchid on her wrist and meet Tak and he would show her around, and then they maybe would sleep together. And then she would meet Lanya and maybe sort of fall in love and someone would show up with a partially burned notebook of poetry and she would maybe vaguely remember having written it? Then she would take up writing herself and it would just go on like that.

Bellona, Destroyer of Cities then is more like another round of Dhalgren – a repetition (increasingly frayed), but with only the vaguest memory of having already lived through the very disaster that they all somehow suspect is about to happen again.

I don’t know that anybody would necessarily need to understand our logic in order to understand or enjoy, be inspired by or just be engaged in what we ended up making.

What was it like seeing your characters ‘in the ﬂesh’ as it were? Did it affect your own vision of the key ﬁgures and the city itself?

SRD: Well, this isn’t the first time Dhalgren has made it to another medium. In the mid-’80s, maybe 25 years ago, a Los Angeles composer, Quentin Llorentes, wrote a rock opera based on Dhalgren. It had an L.A. run about the length of Jay and Tanya’s show here in New York at the Kitchen. I wasn’t able to get out to the coast to see it. But Llorentes sent me some very nice tapes – it was a very ambitious work. It was also quite beautiful. Listening to it for the first time was an experience – indeed, it was the experience that kind of rearranged the inside of my head and made me look at my own work differently. Probably that’s because it was first: I was a lot younger; and more closely connected in time to the creation of the book – far more in touch with the young man who had written it. Before I packed them away with my stored papers, I had a stack of various quality film script adaptations of the novel that people have sent me over the years – some of them good, and, yes, some pathetic.

So the simple answer to your question is, no; it didn’t affect my vision too much. Science fiction fans are extremely committed to their chosen field of writing. Back in ’78 or ’79, I went to a Balticon – a science fiction convention in Baltimore, Maryland – and the first evening, as I was walking down the 10th-floor hotel hall, I looked up, and from around the corner, came a some dozen or dozen-and-a-half young people, black, white, Asian, female and male, in black leather, vests and pants, boots and wrist braces, with loops of chain around their necks. The local science fiction club had decided to come to the convention dressed as a nest of Scorpions. Visually, they were a pretty impressive bunch, and I was really disoriented for a few seconds, to see something I had imagined in a story become real and corporeal. When they recognized me, they began to laugh – and, in a moment, I was laughing too.

But this wasn’t in a theater.

This was in a Baltimore 10th-ﬂoor hotel corridor. I believe we all ended up at a party together. They were interesting kids, and we had some interesting conversations.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. You’re asking about my innate emotional reaction to the piece Jay and Tanya put on, on the deepest level. And the truth is, on that level I didn’t have one. I enjoyed what they did. I was complimented by their expenditure of energy and intelligence. I could honestly tell anyone who asked me that it was an interesting evening in the theater, and two weeks of sold-out performances, pretty much bare that out.

But, at the level you’re interrogating, that had happened when I wrote the book itself, with a little bit left over, in the years immediately following.

Any artist should be pleased, honored, and grateful for intelligent attention, and those are my feelings toward Jay and Tanya and the incredible actors they marshaled for their play – as I am to you for your interest, and the fact that it’s intense enough to manifest itself in these questions.

Jay, when did you ﬁrst encounter Dhalgren?

JS: About ﬁve years ago I met a visual artist named Anne Lislegaard, who was preparing a work based on the novel and she said I should read it. It took me a year or so to get through it the ﬁrst time, and about two days to get through it the second time. I had never heard of it, somehow I had missed out. I keep meeting people, like you, who read it when they were 14 or so. That’s crazy. Of course they all share this strange hyper-intelligence. So I think I’m going to give it to my nephew when he turns 14. I wish I had read it then.

You’ve made strong use of cinematography and music in your version – does this pre-empt a possible attempt to bring it to the big screen?

JS: No, not really. I’ve thought very little about it. I use cameras in the same way that most people use microphones – to see closer, louder, to see around corners, etc. It is used principally as a way of making visible the details of expression that would otherwise have been too soft, too subtle, too far away to be properly communicative. I don’t think much about making movies. I’m pretty busy making live events. I would consider it. Maybe television (the small screen). Maybe as a series. Either way, if I made a ﬁlm version of this novel I would want to make the whole thing. That would require something on the order of 24 hours? I’ll ask around and see who might be interested in getting involved… It would be interesting to me. My next science ﬁction endeavor has something to do with television.

What do you think? Would it make a movie? Who would play the Kid?

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SRD: Well, that’s something readers enjoy speculating about. I think, in today’s world, a ﬁlm validates a work in some way for one level of the readership. But that’s not the level I’m concerned with. I’m an old fashioned guy. I’m much more interested in the concerns you’ll ﬁnd expressed in Cyril Connolly’s book from 1938, Enemies of Promise: “How do you write a book that will last in various printings on bookstore shelves for, minimum, a decade?”

How to write a book someone might want to turn into a movie couldn’t interest me less. As far as I’m concerned, the work doesn’t need any sort of popular validation other than the million or so readers it seems to have corralled into reading it, many of them, like you, willing to read through it several times.

Dhalgren is a written text.

The things it does, the contradiction its dramatizes, can only exist on paper – can only have the effect they have on paper. Or, at any rate, that’s really all I was interested in. The rest is aesthetic games for others, that I certainly don’t begrudge them; but those are still secondary as far as I’m concerned.

A question like that is for the person who directs the movie to decide. The question holds no interest for me, and pretending that it did, however regular a guy it might make me sound like, would be silly.

The apocalypse seems to be very much on the cultural/literary agenda at present (I’m thinking of younger writers such as Ben Marcus and Brian Evenson, but also Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). Why do you think that is?

SRD: Apocalyptic stories have been popular with people ever since John sat down on the rocks and began scribbling at Patmos. I don’t think we have any more than anyone else.

We have no control over our own birth – and frighteningly little over our death. So people are always going back to tales of origins and endings.

I’m very fond of – and, hell, impressed with – Evenson’s work. It’s emotionally daring in a way I can recognize and appreciate. And Marcus certainly tries for an interesting level of inventiveness. To me, Cormac McCarthy seemed a lot more interesting 15 or so years ago than he does today. His theologized violence seems badly under-analyzed and far more glib than insightful.

Two of the core components of Dhalgren are the claustrophobic nature of the city of Bellona and the surrounding catastrophe – how did you go about depicting these?

JS: That’s interesting; I never thought of Bellona as claustrophobic. But I guess I see your point. It’s described as a city that used to have two million people living in it, but now there are only about a thousand. A big city with a lot of empty buildings. Big enough to get lost in. Big enough to have been segregation-able. So, while reading I had assumed that everyone went to Teddy’s not because it was the only game in town but because it was the best place to hang out – the drinks are always on the house!

The catastrophe is the real issue. The differing opinions as to what caused the catastrophe (which seems not to have ended) are what really got my attention. Some passionately explain that an underage white girl was raped by a big black guy and the city was burned as the result of a race-fueled revenge riot. Other’s make it clear that what really happened was that an important black activist was shot and the city burned in protest of that particularly tragic crime. Maybe this is how Sodom and Gomorrah burned. Not in a single ﬂash but in one ongoing repetition like a truly sadistic vision of hell. A multiple profusion expressed in a recurring ball of ﬁre.

I like the way in which race plays forward in Delany’s novel. No ofﬁcial perspective circumscribes the discourse, no discourse contains the image. Characters like Kid, Tarzan, George and June, and Jack all subvert so many ideologies of rightness. It’s contradictory, unstable, unpredictable, and reads more or less like it could have been written this morning. The novel isn’t concerned with anybody’s politics in general or prejudices in particular. Least of all mine. So I tried to make a play that would also not be too focused in its politics, prejudices, or ideologies, but nonetheless would allow them space to exist in relief, one against the other. Chip’s comments during the rehearsal were super helpful on this front. Chip was super helpful on many fronts. But especially understanding the humour and the tender playfulness that is necessary to actually comprehend the crisis.

I put the Richards family essentially at the center. A wobbling nuclear family in the middle but ready to blow. I’m thinking about an American city. A deeply familiar image. Mrs. Richards, played by Tanya Selvaratnam, wanted to hold on to an existence that really no longer existed. Held on desperately even as the buildings and walls crumbled around her. And so the catastrophe leaks out of this enormous internal pressure. And this pressure in turn plays each member of the family into an array of violent postures. Their daughter, June is so pressurized that she can barely breathe and ends up running through the streets in search of something that will release the crave. She ends up pushing her brother Bobby to his death at the bottom of an elevator shaft. It’s really sad what happens. It’s really sad to see just how lonely this family actually is together. We made a very intense family with great physical performers like Jon Morris and Natalie Thomas playing the two kids. I really loved those scenes. Caleb Hammond played both Mr. Richards and Tak (the two engineers). And when this family explodes, it takes the whole city with it.

Dhalgren is always described as “science ﬁction” but, like Ballard’s work, that description seems simplistic to me (not to damn SF per se). Did you ever feel it was slightly ghettoized by that description?

SRD: Well, despite your intentions, the statement damns SF nevertheless. It’s got the same logical structure as: “Of course I

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don’t mean to be racist, but somehow you don’t seem lazy and shiftless enough so that it seems ridiculously simplistic to call you black. Did you ever feel ghettoized by being called black?” What’s “simplistic” is your concept of science ﬁction – or, in the hypothetical analogy, of blacks. You just haven’t been exposed to enough John Crowly and Joanna Russ, Gene Woolf and Greer Gilman, Thomas Disch and China Mieville, Bester and Sturgeon, Roger Zelazny and Kit Reed, L. Timmel Duchamp and M. John Harrison, Damien Broderick and Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link and Jeff Vandemeer to enrich your own image of science ﬁction to the point where it will encompass Ballard and... I suppose, myself. I go through this only so that you’ll be aware there’s nothing complimentary in the cliché you’ve just uttered.

Science ﬁction is a ghetto not because it deserves to be but because too many people judge it by its worst examples and are too lazy to hunt out its best and revise their picture accordingly.

But I don’t ﬁnd those genre questions overly interesting. To say anything intelligent about them, however, you have to have enough genre history under your belt at least to reach an informed level. It’s like trying to talk about poetry if all you’ve ever read is the lyrics to a few Dylan or Beetles songs. Sure, they’re good and may even be of poetic interest, but you’re still a pretty limited reader.

You replaced the orchids with guns. Was that to give it a grittier, more here-and-now feel? Always loved the visceral notion of the orchids myself.

JS: No it wasn’t really about timeliness or edginess or grittiness. None of that stuff really. It’s a big novel with weeks or even months of action packed days and nights described. Choosing what to exclude is so difﬁcult. The shooting of Paul Fenster, who was played by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, was so important to me. Since Paul was shot and not stabbed, I choose to make Paul’s shooting into a recurring theme and so it made sense to have a gun appear from time to time. So there’s a gun.

People also get beat with pipes. But I love the orchid. And I didn’t mean to replace it. I just don’t have it yet but I intend to get one. By May. We did actually make a few different orchids but none of them really worked. So it was a bit of a bottle-neck on the design end. It’s a difﬁcult object to engineer. In the novel I recall there were ongoing safety issue with Kid’s orchid (another real reality effect/detail) so it needs to look really dangerous and be really dangerous, but actors need to be able to do things more than once.

Here’s a question for both of you. Dhalgren was ﬁrst published in 1974, I believe. In what ways have the cultural and societal issues within Dhalgren changed? What do you both think of America’s ﬁrst African American President?

JS: I don’t know if I can answer this.

The novel for me is unforgettable. About time and outside of most time. I know that it’s prose (not poetry), and I hope Chip will forgive my saying so, but it turns out, Dhalgren is most of the best poetry I’ve ever read…

The poetry I think rides outside of social and cultural currencies of relevance.

The social landscape that unfolds in Dhalgren reads to me like a future, of which we have only the vaguest memories. Things have changed of course and continue to change but so does my reading of the book. As a humanist (I am not yet really a machinist) I look forward to aspects of Dhalgren feeling a little more distant, a little more out of date. What I mean is that I look forward to aspects of the book feeling more like historical record than contemporary reﬂection. Other aspects of the book, like some of Dostoyevsky’s works, will be relevant as long as there are people on the planet who can read them.

As for Obama? I have to think on this. A friend of ours, Catherine Gund told us a story about how her then four-year-old daughter, on her way to school, asked who the ﬁrst black president was. It wasn’t somehow thinkable to someone like Sadie to imagine that there hadn’t already been an African-American President. She’s part of a generation for whom America’s racial divide is not the same as it was for mine and those before. It takes a four-year-old sometimes to point out some of the most obvious truths.

It’s making history. Let’s hope it makes memory.

SRD: I think that’s the most hopeful answer I can imagine to that question. So let’s end it here. Thanks very much for taking this time with Jay and me.

Special thanks to Tanya Selvaratnam Scheib and Paul D. Miller for making this interview possible.

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Jay Scheib’s Bellona at The Kitchen « Culturebot 4/4/10 8:45 AM

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Arts Elsewhere Jay Scheib’s Bellona at The Kitchen Subscribe to Culturebot Art Beat Posted on April 3, 2010 by Andy Enter your email address to Artsbeat Jay Scheib’s Bellona, Destroyer of Cities is a sensory overload of a surreal sci-fi subscribe to this blog and Brooklyn Rail mindfuck, a seriously epic vision of a post-apocalyptic city. It is slippy and unnerving, receive notifications of new violently sexual, brash, troubled and troubling. posts by email. Contemporary Performance The show takes place in Bellona, which has been decimated by some disaster that no- createquity one quite remembers, and it is now a shattered landscape of violence and mayhem. Culture Monster Every shifts – sexuality, race, place, politics – and the citizens have to cope with life in Sign me up! Networked Performance a lawless, upended society. The story follows two groups of people, a ragtag ever- changing band of street-type people and a four-person family living in an apartment Upstaged that serves as a type of bunker against the chaos outside. The main character is Kid or Support Culturebot! WNYC Culture Blog Kidd – a newcomer to Bellona who can’t remember her name but, determined to Donate via PayPal become a great writer, uses the chaos as inspiration for a mysterious book of poems.

In Bellona sex is violence and once-normal interactions are fraught with conflict and Austin aggression. Scheib’s staging is intensely physical with the actors throwing each other Fusebox Festival around and into the set, wreaking destruction on each other and their environs. Conversations are like interrogations and what passes for affection is akin to assault. twitter Rude Mechs follow me on Texas Biennial Several crucial scenes unfold to a thundering edit of Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks – and it captures the mood of threat, violence and majestic destruction perfectly.

Austria The experience of watching the show is as disorienting as life is for the characters – Facebook Salzburg Festival people come and go with little to no introduction, their names change, their identities, Become a fan on sexualities and genders shift. Lines are delivered like threats and accusations. These Wiener Festwochen are not well-adjusted people having emotional crises, these are people who are living with their backs constantly against the wall as the world falls apart around them.

Baltimore Heightening the sense of disorientation is Scheib’s use of video. He is one of the few directors who really seems to know how to blend performative and cinematic Baltimore Theatre Project vocabularies, using video cameras as tools to direct our attention to moments that ARCHIVES The Lof/t might be lost, or to heighten our awareness of multiple realities or just to create a Select Month wham city fractured sense of reality.

The show is a rough beast, indeed, and getting caught up in the maelstrom is well Categories worth the trip. It plays at the Kitchen until April 10. It will probably sell out so get your tix Select Category Belgium ahead of time. EFA Bellona, Destroyer of Cities features performances by Sarita Choudhury, Caleb IETM Hammond, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Jon Morris, William Nadylam, Kaneza Schaal, April 2010 Kaai Theater Tanya Selvaratnam, April Sweeney, and Natalie Thomas; Scenic Design by Peter Ksander; Costume Design by Oana Botez-Ban; Sound Design by Catherine McCurry; MTWTFSS Kunsten Festival Lighting Design by Miranda k. Hardy; Video and Photography by Carrie Mae Weems 1 2 3 4 Toneelhuis and Jay Scheib; Assistant Director: Laine Rettmer; Tour Producer: ArKtype/Thomas O. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Kriegsmann; Produced by Tanya Selvaratnam; Conceived and Directed by Jay Scheib. http://culturebot.org/2010/04/03/jay-scheibs-bellona-at-the-kitchen/ Page 1 of 7 MARS 2011

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Stage Review: “Bellona, Destroyer of Cities” at the ICA By Jason Rabin May 15 Leave a Comment

“Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, is performed by the kind of superhero-like actors who appear to be preternaturally beautiful, physical and emotional acrobats. It’s a sexy, dangerous and bewildering piece and it also feels perfectly appropriate for the stage of the I.C.A.

“Bellona” is an adaptation of the 900-page philosophical dystopian sci-fi novel, Dahlgren, by Samuel R. Delaney. Created meticulously over two years through improvisation and experimentation. It’s performed in two sparsely laid out rooms full of audio and video equipment. The rooms are separated visually by three video screens stacked vertically in a column at center stage. Action in the rooms is shown on the screens, not only providing alternate angles on a scene, but alternate settings; A completely different background–that of seedy diner–shows up in the video versions, as if scenes were filmed against a green screen and edited.

So “Bellona” is part live theater and part film. It’s a nonlinear, disjointed sci-fi mystery. It is in fact so complex in form and narrative content that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps to keep things from getting to heady, the performance itself starts with a graphically simulated, multi-racial, bi-sexual orgy, one of the participants of which appears to be a neo-Nazi.

Things don’t really get any more stable, coherent or comfortable from there. What is clear is that “Bellona” is the story of a poet, played by Sarita Choudhury, who, suffering from amnesia, is dubbed simply, “Kid.” Kid is in a dangerous place, both mentally and

http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/culturefashion/stage-review-bellona-destroyer-of-cities-at-the-ica/ 1 physically. She drifts between a diner full of unsavory characters who each try to seduce her with varied success, through naked streets full of unending violence, and a crumbling apartment building occupied by a nuclear family, each member of which seems to be working through personal traumas. Sometimes Kid seems to be seeking a publisher for her poetry. In the apartment, she seems to seek shelter, negotiate the possibility of a job with the man of the house, and perhaps work on solving a bit of a mystery that links the family’s daughter to characters in the diner.On her journeys, she takes a composition notebook full of her poetry, which describes a decaying city in which the human id is given free reign. From time to time we hear snippets of her poetry, and at crucial moments, we hear her lines critiqued. What is not clear is whether or not her poetry is creating the strange urban dreamscape we see around her, or if the city has created her schizophrenia.

The play evokes nothing better than such a mental state, linking scenes together not by cause and effect but through association and the underlying feelings of fear and surprise. It’s the most authentically surreal performance I’ve scene on stage. It took me some time to put the world back together upon leaving it, but it’s an experience I’m glad to have had.

Adapted and Directed by Jay Scheib, Bellona the Destroyer of Cities plays again at the ICA on March 15 at 4 pm as part of the Emerging America Festival.

http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/culturefashion/stage-review-bellona- destroyer-of-cities-at-the-ica/

http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/culturefashion/stage-review-bellona-destroyer-of-cities-at-the-ica/ 2

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mportantthingstoknowaboutdirectorJayScheib:Born: “Oneofmygoalsistopaymyactorsasmuchasthey 1969,Shenandoah,Iowa.Occupation:associateprofessorin wouldmaketemping,”hesays.Still,hisregularactors,a musicandtheatrearts,MassachusettsInstituteofTechnol- groupofsixtoeightthatonemightcalltheJayScheibPlay- ogy.Numberofproductionsslatedfor2008:ﬁve,threeof ers,moanlikeaddictswhentheythinkofworkingwithhim themworldpremieres,takingplaceinthreecountries.(“Last again.“WheneverIgetacallfromJay,Ijuststopthepresses,” season,Ihadsevenpremieresinﬁvedifferentcountries,” saysNewYork–basedperformerEricDeanScott.Heand @ Scheibsaysevenly.Hesays therestofTeamScheib everything evenly.) Number aregamblingbigas ofresidenttheatregigsthis they develop Scheib’s yearandeveryyearhereto- exuberantly physical, fore: zero. heavily technologized Howcansuchadirec- butemotionallyopen torasScheib—who,notso style of theatremaking. incidentally, has also writ- Audiencesandcritics tenoradaptedscriptsfor mayloveitorhateit, aboutadozenofhisown buttheyarerarelyindif- productions—earn degrees ferent. Scheib himself andawardsfromimpeccably cites Tadeusz Kantor,

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of the resident theatre’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. Desert is a smashup ofrelationshipsinspiredbytheworksof filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni and Three Mile Island transcripts. Disintegrat- ing couples video and re-video each other withmultiplelivefeedsdesignedbyScheib’s frequent collaborator Leah Gelpe. InMarch,hisas-yet-untitledMars projectpremieresatP.S.122,combining scientiﬁcfactandﬁctiontoimaginegenuine space colonization. In July, Scheib’s staging of the biographical song cycle by the gypsy cabaret punk band World Inferno Friendship Society, titled AddictedtoBadIdeas:Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century, has its European

premiere at the Salzburg Sommerszene (it IFJ< :8CC8?8E playedthispastSeptemberatthePhiladelphia Nfic[ @e]\ief =i`\e[j_`g JfZ`\kp è 8[[`Zk\[ kf 9X[ @[\Xj Xk k_\ G_`cX[\cg_`X C`m\ 8ikj =\jk`mXc% LiveArtsFestival).ThiscomingSeptember, notfarawayinBudapest,hewilladaptPhilip ofGertrudeStein’sTheMakingofAmericans Scheibistallandlanky,withthick K.Dick’ssciencefictioninapiececalled at the Walker Art Center. Scheib is writing brown curly hair going gray and a square, TimeAgainandAgain,forPontMühely the libretto. friendlyfacewithapointofachin.He theatre (whose actors also plan to take part And that’s the year. Add to that at least moves and speaks casually—at a roundtable intheMarsproject,iffundingpermits). one student production, various readings, discussion,he’drathersprawlthansit.A Anengagementtentativelyscheduledfor teaching.“Forthepastthreeyears,I’vebeen formerhighschooltrack-and-fielder,hecan December will bring him to Minneapolis to booked a year and half in advance,” he says, live in his body as well as his mind. (The directthepremiereofAnthonyGatto’sopera again, evenly. “This year it’s almost two.” result,perhaps,ofhisMidwesternfarm-boy

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EJ8C;8 @E\idXepËj violencewasdrawntothe bringtotheprocessandhowyouandonlyyou JXXice[`jZ_\j JkXXkjk_\Xk\i% surface,enactedwithbox- canbringthatthing,”saysanotherfrequent ing, slap fights, compulsive actor-collaborator April Sweeney. When their upbringing. Actor Aimée Phelan-Deconinck vomiting and semi-gymnastic stunts. Was extensivetableworkonWomen finally ended, remembers, “In Germany, we were outside this acting or contact improv? It played like Scheibbroughtthecasttoitsfeetwithsmall a rehearsal space. A shirt was in a tree, very both—and, at the first show, also a bit like exercises and wild-card requests—recipes high, and he lassoed it.”) porn (when they’re talking, you just want formomentstheactorswouldgooffand This casualness is also deceptive—or theaction).ButwhenIreturnedforthefinal create.“Wecomposedalistofthingsto no longer the whole story. The sprawling show of the run, all was knit together: sen- have,”saysScott,“like30secondsofarepeti- productionsofHeinerMüllerandofScheib’s sible,Argentineatthesource,butAmerican tionoronemomentofthesmallestpossible own works (produced by his own theatres, in tone and, most important, continuously violentevent.”Oneactorknewhowtobox. theArcadeTheatreandtheAmericanThe- atre Institute) that gave him outlaw cred in Minneapolisinthe’90shavebeenreplaced, 10 years later, by shows that display a more focused mind and structured development.

N?8K Ispace opera Kommander Kobayashi after seeing his work inBerlin.“Thisisrare—therearefewpeople whocancontainsuchvariousvisualandother impressions.” When asked why so many of his adapted works have “after” in the cred- its—“after Tolstoy,” or Euripides—Scheib speaksofsearchingforwaystomakethe works as surprising as they were when they wereborn.WithTolstoy’splayThePowerof Darkness,whichhedevelopedwithhisMIT students before directing the show for Pont Mühely,hedroppedcharacters,restored censored scenes and rewrote based on actor improvisations. The play’s rural violence resonated for Scheib. “I grew up in Iowa in the’80swheneverythirdfarmerwentbank- rupt.Ratherthandoingtheplayasamuseum piece, I did research to see to what extent it paid homage to its time and engaged social

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They used it. Dance-trained suggests a formal economic Phelan-Deconinck can stretch relationship that they do not herankleaboveherhead,casu- yet have). Her role is ﬂexible, ally.Sotheyusedthattoo. she says, but the management LikethelatePolishexper- responsibilities are now hers. imentalistKantor,Scheibgives Financialstabilityisstillagoal. titlestodifferentperiodsofhis “Wefantasizeabouttaking work.Thepastsevenyears, over one of the regional the- ending with Desert,were“The atres,”shesays,evenasshe Flight out of Naturalism.” A admitsshehasnocontactwith newera,“SimulatedCities/ them. Simulated Systems,” is being Howlongthisalternative born with the Mars project. circuitcansustainthemisa Scheib’s research bent is hanging question. “I put the supportedbyhiscurrentberth work out; I write letters. Most

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By Helen Shaw

MISSION CONTROL Scheib probes a strange planet. Photograph: Naomi White

Deep in the belly of an abandoned vault on Wall Street, a man with a lizard tail talks softly to his foam claws as another stages an aggressive seduction in a boardroom. An almost whisper-soft suggestion—“Could you try that a little more tenderly?”—comes from the lanky director crouching at the lovers’ feet. Even though embraces in Jay Scheib’s shows usually look like wrestling holds, the note persuades actor Caleb Ham- mond to grip his paramour slightly less viciously—as he half-nelsons her into a revolving chair. The lizard picks up a camera. http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/theater/28605/martian-to-a-different-drummer Welcome to Mars. Or at least, welcome to a rehearsal of Untitled Mars: This Title May Change, a droll, discom- bobulating trip to the Red Planet as dreamed up by Scheib. An unlikely collision of scientific experiment and Philip K. Dick, the show takes its inspiration from one of the Mars Desert Research Stations, a deadly serious outpost where researchers wear space suits and run around the Utah desert. While the scientists simulate life on Mars, Scheib’s company will simulate the scientists—though with a significantly lower budget. Set designer Peter Ksander describes the mash-up of sci-fi and reality as the new alienation effect: “Jay is using Mars in the same way that Brecht used the Thirty Years War.” It’s not that alien: The 38-year-old director lives in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts and teaches at MIT, where some of his students might actually have a crack at being Mars pioneers.

As with almost all of Scheib’s work, the show will be thick with video, much of it shot live in the room. He may not want to become a one-trick pony (“I have an Iphigenia coming up that has no video at all!” he assures us. “Maybe three light cues!”), but Scheib is still known for his multimedia work. Video appears in most of his shows, its function changing to create phantoms (The Vomit Talk of Ghosts), a sensation of surveillance (This Is the End of Sleeping) or a self-consciously cinematic composition (the Godard-inflected This Place Is a Desert). But the director claims there is a constant. “It all stems from trying to work on naturalism,” he explains. “I wanted to take up the game that all my incredibly cool teachers—Robert Woodruff and Anne Bogart—had said was dead. It was my rebellion.”

The resulting works, exquisitely designed with the lackadaisical rhythms of everyday speech, look totally unlike the rest of the New York avant-garde, though they ring bells with theater buffs in Germany and France. “I am synthesizing techniques that already exist,” Scheib readily admits. “It’s just that in Europe, the Wooster Group isn’t on the fringes—they’ve been folded into the mainstream.”

Not everybody is a fan. Scheib’s dedication to observing human behavior forces theatrical time to slow to something like real time, and the pace downshift can leave viewers impatient and disoriented. (Tip: Pretend you’re in a gallery watching an installation.) And while theater has been incorporating projection for decades, audiences still rankle at how the video steals focus. Says Scheib: “Desert upset a lot of people. Theater audiences feel bad that they’re watching a screen. But for me, video is a delivery system. It’s simply a way to bring the performer closer.”

Scheib may be the most acclaimed experimental American director whose work you have never seen. The New York premiere of This Place Is a Desert during Under the Radar in January moved him into the critical spotlight, but this production at P.S. 122 will be his first high-profile run of any length here.

New York economics hobble Scheib’s process. His languorous, ensemble-driven works need long rehearsal periods and the kind of technical fine-tuning that can’t be done on Off-Off Broadway’s panicky schedule. At MIT, he develops work in peace, and then spends roughly four months in Europe making pieces at well-funded spots like the Staatstheater Saarbrücken or Salzburg’s Mozarteum. The expense of dealing with Equity and New York real estate drives our most interesting directors into the arms of European state funding.

Another major director who gigs too rarely in New York, Woodruff taught Scheib, but now sees him as a colleague. “It’s great that he found a home at MIT,” Woodruff says. “He can fly off to Europe, but he still has a place to do his research. If you find another setup like that—please tell me first.” The struggle for funding is just another reason to make Untitled Mars. “You should go to these space-vision conferences,” Scheib says with a chuckle. “That community sounds just like a theater conference—it’s always about the lack of funding. It’s very rarely about art.”

Untitled Mars: This Title May Change is at P.S. 122.

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/theater/28605/martian-to-a-different-drummer

Theater Time Out New York / Issue 655 : Apr 16–22, 2008 Untitled Mars: This Title May Change P.S. 122 Conceived and directed by Jay Scheib. With ensemble cast. 1hr 30mins. No Intermission.

SPACE ODDITY Sweeney, right, encounters an astronaut. Photograph: Justin Bernhaut

Director Jay Scheib doesn’t look like a geek. With his art-school specs, tousled hair and stylish attire, this laid-back orchestrator of multimedia installations surrounds himself with strikingly attractive actors and sexy technology. Yet scratch the surface and under the hipster auteur you might find a chubby nerd building a spaceship out of tin foil and cardboard in the garage. Now, Scheib and his dedicated actor-technicians have graduated to fancier materials with Untitled Mars: This Title May Change, a docu-video-performance piece that merges speculative science and avant-garde theatrics.

The elaborate, multizoned playing space created by Peter Ksander (the most ingenious set designer working downtown) is a re- creation of the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah—itself a simulation of the Martian landscape, where scientists hope we’ll es- tablish a colony. The plot (related in elliptical fragments) is a crude pasteup of soap-opera seductions and sci-fi pulp, featuring a real-estate villain (Caleb Hammond), a heroic repair woman (Tanya Selvaratnam) and a scientist (April Sweeney) who may have found a link between schizophrenia and clairvoyance. Oh, and there’s a guy in green makeup with a giant lizard tail.

Using live video feeds and editing software to create the illusion of walking on the Martian surface, Scheib masterfully blends high- tech effects with his performers, who wrestle and simulate sex with gusto. (He himself appears, quizzing real scientists about space exploration via Skype linkup.) Even though the message—wherever we humans go, we’ll bring our problems—is old as Ray Bradbury, at least the vehicle is super space age. (See also “Martian to a different drummer,” page 161.)

—David Cote http://www.timeout.com/newyork/events/off-off-broadway/54302/521200/untitled-mars