The Debate Society, arguably New York's most charming theater company, is adept at seducing their audience with the atmosphere of whatever locale they choose to evoke. Their latest work, called Cape Disappointment, meticulously conjures up Gothic worlds of lost highways, traveling salesmen, Eisenhower-era teens, and roadside bandits. Designer Karl Allen has done excellent work transforming the upstairs theater at P.S. 122 into a romantically decayed drive-in movie, even installing vintage speaker boxes throughout the audience. And to complete the scene, free bags of popcorn are distributed—noisy, crinkly bags that maddeningly break the spell just like at the cinema.
Results tagged “oliverbutler”
We'll be liveblogging the MTVU Woodie Awards tonight (hopefully Jared Leto won't break our blogging fingers) -- if you're looking for something else to do though, here are some suggestions... READING: Spend an evening with Global City Review contributors Linsey Abrams, Fred Tuten, and Michelle Yasmine Valladare. The publication "celebrates the difficulties and possibilities of the 'global city' and other constructions of community...while honoring the subversiveness and originality of ordinary lives," and reflects on New...
The Debate Society is a taut little theater triad comprised of director Oliver Butler and wizardly actors Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos. Their 2006 production, The Snow Hen, took a Norwegian folk tale about an abandoned girl and wove it into a charmingly dark tapestry of melancholy and mystique. Now they’re back at the Ontological Theater (Richard Foreman’s regular digs) with The Eaten Heart, an enchanting mood-play very loosely inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century tome The Decameron, which packs in 100 stories told over the course of ten days by ten people killing time during the Black Plague.
THEATER: Untitled Intentional Exercise #1, a "wild trip through desire and isolation" that combines the talents of Stuck Pigs Squealing, http://www.stuckpigs.com.au/ an Australian theater collective, with those of Mac Wellman, Oliver Butler, and Banana Bag and Bodice, http://www.bananabagandbodice.org/ has a fascinating show-specific website http://stuckpigs.multiply.com/ where the creators have been posting rehearsal videos and notes; check it out for a taste of the improvisational whirlwind you'll enter if you go, though even thus prepared it will surely be crazier, in a good way, than you expected . - Mallory Jensen
THEATER: The Debate Society's "Snow Hen" was a quirky, dreamy take on an old Scandinavian folk tale about the Black Death; now, in "The Eaten Heart," the talented trio of Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen, and Oliver Butler riff on an Italian view of the plague, Boccaccio's bawdy classic Decameron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decameron as the second part of a plague trilogy. This is a workshop production, so while the group's work always seems fresh and engagingly inchoate, here you get to see it while it is that and then some (and with less expensive tickets!). - Mallory Jensen


