World premiere
September 28, 8:00 pm at The Studio, English
Theatre Berlin, additional performances Sept. 29, 30.
UK
premiere at London's Southwark
Playhouse October 4, 7:30 pm, additional performances Oct. 5,
6 at 7:30 pm, Oct. 7, 8 at 9:00 pm, Oct. 9 mantinee at 3:00 pm
After
a few drinks in a downtown bar, he takes her home to his squat -
an abandoned flat in a high-rise overlooking Ground Zero. Is this
a one-night stand, or have they met before? International theatre
company
Axis
Mundi takes a darkly comic look at two victims/perpetrators of the
mass hysteria that swept America and the world in the wake of the September
11th attacks, with asides on the geopolitical ramifications of bad
sex, the art of tactical bed-making and the occult significance of
sharing a hairbrush.
Premiered November
20 at Scena pod Ratuszem, Rynek Glowny 1 (Krakow's main square).
Additional performances Nov. 21 at 7:30 pm
Dec.
11, 12. at 8:00 pm
All
performances in Polish.
Set in the California
desert town of Darwin, Godhead follows the birth, youth and institutionalization
of Dion, a self-proclaimed incarnation of Dionysus. The cycle draws
heavily on the mythology of Euripides' Bacchae, and finds its stylistic
precedent in the American Western surrealism of Sam Shepard and John
Steppling.
At the trilogy's
heart lies a radical reinterpretation of the Dionysian myth, and
an implicit challenge to the classical definition of tragedy. By
presenting the divine conception of Dionysus as a story of deception,
incest, and vengeance, the traditional deus ex machina is made redundant;
no god is needed to set the infernal machine in motion; the cycle
of madness is driven by what is darkest, least rational in man. And
so tragedy, no longer the province of gods reaching into the works
and tinkering with men's fates, nor of playwrights stage-managing
the audience's hearts, becomes again a hymn to man's blind urge to
destruction. The dithyramb reconnects with the oldest, most universal
ritual, in which men carved masks after their own worst faces, and
joined in a frenzied dance meant to frighten away the beast within.
And in their midst,
Dionysus, conceived of lust and born of fear, stands as a scapegoat
that attracts as violently as he repels, that bruises his fists on
the glass ceiling of the Human Divine, that offers himself as a sacrifice,
by whose blood our bestial nature is, for a while, appeased.
Four playwrights,
one Passion...
FOUR VIEWS OF
GOLGOTHA
Holy Week serves
as a pretext for playwrights from L.A., Vancouver, New York, and
Krzeszowice to present radically diverse views on contemporary spirituality
and human nature....[more]
Beata Schimscheiner
and Kamil Rzońca in Pieta
phot. Edyta
Zwolińska
