One Continuous Mistake

Cleave

Coming soon…

Theseus the hero and Asterion the Minotaur hunt each other through an endless labyrinth. As the warrior and the monster spiral toward the center, Theseus discovers what he must sacrifice to leave the bestial past behind. A dance/theatre play about dualism, violence, and the lies that hold us together. An original piece based on the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, Slavoj Zizek, Ovid, Erving Goffman and Georges Bizet et al.

Created by and featuring Benjamin Stuber with Taavo Smith
Additional direction by Jeremy Williams
Design by Benjamin Stuber

Uncle Vodka

A highly theatrical distillation of Anton Chekhov’s classic tragicomedy Uncle Vanya, by way of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.

Somewhere between a frozen nowhere and the end of things, humankind’s representatives—two men and a woman—wait for their lives to begin, or end. As they rebound between the indifference of the without and the intractable within, they kill time, kill pain, act out, and play. Frustration mounts and sense comes unmoored, until, finally, it ends.

Created by Taavo Smith with Kyra Bowman, Benjamin Stuber, and Jeremy Williams
Directed by Jeremy Williams
Costume & Property Design by Benjamin Stuber
Lighting & Sound Design by Jeremy Williams
Featuring Kyra Bowman, Taavo Smith and Benjamin Stuber

Saturday April 3rd and Sunday April 4th, 8:30pm, at ToRoNaDa on the second floor of PS122, 150 1st Ave on the NE corner of 1st and 9th. Tickets are free, but as seating is limited we suggest making reservations at rap@maboumines.org or (212) 473-1991.

Presented as part of the Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program. Produced with the support of the Convergences Theater Collective.

More to come…

Photo credit Alex Miles Younger

The Three Sisters

An adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, by way of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. A two-man athletic meditation on the impossibility of fruition and the abolition of hope.

By Taavo Smith and Benjamin Stuber
Directed by Jeremy Williams
Featuring Taavo Smith and Benjamin Stuber with Micha Frayne
Design by Benjamin Stuber

“The perfect mix… to bring the dark subtlety of Checkhov’s piece into its absurd and broken proper light. Absolutely beautiful in conception and performance, with… an overall precision I haven’t seen in a while.” - Eric Meyer, Moving On

Early last year in Chicago, after only three short weeks of composition and rehearsal, OCM presented an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Eleven characters and nearly all the coherent dialogue were gone—and the two performers, men, were incapable by birth and number of embodying the women of the title—but much to their surprise, somehow, it worked. Despite being cut from four acts to fifteen minutes and being presented in a style that couldn’t have been further from Chekhov’s imagination, the masterpiece was still alive.

Now we present for your amusement the premiere of a new, one-act re-adaptation, once again testing the resilience of The Three Sisters. Our two male performers are still alone, and Masha remains an impossibility, but Chekhov’s words are now joined by those of Shakespeare, Beckett, Sacher-Masoch, Sophocles, Genet, Camus, and Hitler. The result is a loving, thoughtful butchery, honest in our opinion to Chekhov’s darkest intention. And, yes, there will be cake.