Conor Madden in "The Rehearsal." Photo by Ros Kavanaugh

Hamlet is to theater what genocide is to geopolitics: the problem from Hell. What, exactly, are we supposed to make of this play (really three separate plays) and this character? He seems to be trying to get revenge for his father’s murder but at no point does he really do anything about it. Instead he gets mad at his mom, who’s otherwise a minor character, kills his girlfriend’s dad, which drives her to suicide, gets banished from the kingdom, and when he comes back, he’s gotten his poor old school chums murdered, takes breaks to talk to skulls, still doesn’t do anything to good old step-dad, and then dies in a duel with the guy who was supposed to be his brother-in-law. It’s downright Beckettian in that nothing happens a couple times over, while people talk and talk and talk about nothing.

It’s also, apparently, the greatest play ever.

For Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Hamlet, the character, forms half of a modern Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, along with Falstaff, who heads up the Bacchanalia. Hamlet isn’t just the sine qua non of modern humanity’s crisis of identity, he is the vehicle that delivered it to Western culture in the first place. For T.S. Eliot, Hamlet was only difficult to understand because the play itself was a complete artistic failure. He famously dubbed it “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature,” by which he meant that “more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art” (Eliot did love his chiasmus).

But where does that actually leave the theater artist who has to put on the show? A pretty shitty place, is the answer. With all that accumulated meaning and expectation, how is anyone ever supposed to actually perform the role of Hamlet?

This essential problem underlies Irish theater company Pan Pan‘s The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, which comes to the NYU’s Skirball Center next week for a short run (through Oct. 13; tickets $25-$45) before heading to the Wexner Arts Center later this month. Featuring a lecturing academic, a play-within-a-play performed by high school students, and, yes, an actual Great Dane, the show focuses on the problem of how, exactly, you choose an actor to portray Hamlet, when the character seems too big for one person, too complex for one single portrayal. Rather than answer it, Pan Pan raises and explores the question. Here, the audience is given no less than three choices, and yes, the audience, in the end, is asked to choose.

Earlier this week, after a half-hour of failed international calls, I reached director and Pan Pan co-founder Gavin Quinn in Dublin and spoke with him about for a half an hour about the work.

“The idea behind this was to look at, I suppose, the innate theatricality of Hamlet,” he explained early on in the conversation. “So it was to look at putting on a production of Hamlet, and looking at how, in a sense, Hamlet was already a little bubble of theatricality. And the second idea was, how people are never satisfied with how they play Hamlet.”

“So we developed that into a two-part show. The first part is about allowing the audience to think about Hamlet in the way that it’s an unusual play, in that there are three extant texts of Hamlet. And the second part is about how on earth are you going to choose who plays Hamlet?” Because, he added, “For whoever plays Hamlet, it’s generally a question of how much you fail, not how much you succeed.”

Founded in 1991 by Quinn and Aedin Cosgrove, who primarily serves as the company’s designer, Pan Pan has long been a stand-out in Irish theater, which–due in no small part to Ireland’s literary heritage–has been dominated by a literary theater focused on the text. Over the past twenty years, Pan Pan has presented a string of acclaimed shows that have toured internationally, including Oedipus Loves You, which played PS 122 a couple years ago.

“These things come in waves and ideas filter through,” he commented when I asked about the contemporary Irish theater scene, which seems to be breaking out in new directions with a variety of young devising companies. “[O]ver the last four or five years there was quite a number of young, independent groups who are, if you like, exploring different forms of theater. Whether anyone can be experimental anymore is an area for debate. In our case we would say we were actually making work for an audience to make an audience interested in theater. It’s a careful ordering of priorities, about bringing the audience with you. it’s not about just, say, preaching to the converted.”

Quinn mainly credits his and Cosgrove’s inspiration to John McCormick, the founder of the drama department at Trinity College, Dublin, where he and Cosgrove met. McCormick introduced them to the Continental tradition of Art or Director’s Theater, particularly the French tradition (Quinn mentioned the likes of Jean Vilar and Roger Blin), as well as movements in avant-garde art (Cosgrove studied art history as well as drama). By the time they left college, as Quinn explained it, “We just decided to start our own company because we just couldn’t see any possibility of working for anybody else. Or wanted to.”

Pan Pan works in diverse forms, from devised works to innovative presentations of texts. Their most recent production, which played at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre to acclaim just a few months ago, was an installation/sound-sculpture production of Samuel Beckett’s radio play, All That Fall. Oedipus Loves You mixed up Aeschylus and Freud in a garage rock blender. For The Rehearsal, the company cast an even wider net.

One part of the show is actually just a lecture on Hamlet by a noted academic (in New York, it will be given by former NYU President L. Jay Oliva). The company also casts a group of teenagers from the local community to perform the play-within-the-play: in this case, nine high school students from around the city will be performing two scenes from Hamlet, the grave digger scene and Ophelia’s funeral. And also, due to border controls, the Great Dane has to be recruited locally as well.

“There is a dog in the show, believe it or not,” Quinn explained after I asked, concerned I’d misread something. “A Great Dane. And it’s there for specific reasons, not just because it’s a pun, if you like, a visual pun of a Great Dane actually being in the performance. We observe the actors onstage, wandering around in rehearsal or existing in the space, whichever you way you want to look at it. We also observe the dog in the space, and how an animal moving, I suppose, un-self-consciously, is quite arresting to look at. And the dog then also accompanies the academic, who gives a lecture about Hamlet. So the dog is there as a kind of foil to the academic’s rather dry delivery of a lecture about Hamlet.”

“It’s that sort of yin and yang between it being a pro-intellectual production and anti-intellectual production. We have a dog on one hand, and the academic on the other.”

Just as the aleatoricism of a live animal introduced into the performance (“We let the dog sort of do its own thing in the beginning, you know, roam around. And then the academic just has to learn how to handle the dog. Because you know, a Great Dane can weigh 90 kilos, 14 stone…”) adds another layer for the audience to consider when looking at the problem of playing Hamlet, so too does the introduction of non-professional student actors.

“The professional actors, in a sense, watch themselves performing onstage,” Quinn told me. “And that’s for a number of reasons. Obviously, Hamlet refers to this new fashion of boys’ acting groups. He kind of makes jokes about, ‘Be careful, because when you grow up, you’ll be doing yourself out of a job.’ And also you could, of course, perceive or interpret Hamlet as being a quite adolescent play, and what the teenagers bring to the performance is something, perhaps, that a professional actor wouldn’t able to, or dare to.”

Age, in fact, is one of the trickiest parts about the role. Audiences are used to seeing actors at the height of their career tackle the role because it’s so challenging, even though they’re occasionally quite older than the character they’re playing, who’s supposed to be, roughly, of university age. Quinn agreed when I mentioned this, commenting: “In our case, we have three Hamlets–you choose which Hamlet you prefer. One Hamlet’s 27, the other is 24, and the other is 34.”

“Hamlet is strange because obviously he appears to be very young in places, when he’s hanging around with his mates from the university, but then is referred to by a specific age when he goes mad, by the gravedigger, so he can seem to be anywhere between his twenties and his early thirties. But often as not he’s played by an older actor.”

What’s presented in the final portion of the show is, essentially, a series of auditions by these three actors, with the first part of the show intended to contextualize for and focus the audience on the problem of performing the role. The audience is left to sort out for themselves which actor best embodies the character, which is tricky because, as Quinn himself notes, you sort of want to combine all three to get just what you want. Together, these disparate elements serve to help the audience see and perhaps understand Hamlet in a new way, not least to liberate it from the world of literary scholarship by breathing new life into it as a text for performance.

“The ideas seemed to gel together because I think they’re quite organic and quite embedded already in the Hamlet text,” Quinn told me. “And I think it’s all to do with the fact that Hamlet’s a sort of connoisseur of theater, you know, his love of the players and description of actors as having their ‘bad epitaph’ and ‘ill-report’ while they live. And his use of the players within the play, and the sense that who we play is more important than who we are, that goes all the way through, comes across in the way that we’ve presented the show.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Over in Dublin, it looks like Gavin Quinn’s Pan Pan has worked wonders with Samuel Beckett’s 1956 radio play All That Fall. Irish Theatre Magazine has both an interview with Quinn as well as a glowing review of the show, which plays at Project Arts Centre though Sept. 2, both of which are well worth reading.

It’s a fascinating concept, because, as previously mentioned, it’s a radio play, and the Beckett estate being notoriously tight-fisted about any production that deviates from the established norm, it’s hard to imagine a production that’s not, as I recently described it, a Masterpiece Theater-version. As even ITM‘s critic Patrick Lonergan notes:

[P]erhaps the second important point [about the production] is how refreshing (and unusual) it is to be surprised by an Irish production of a play by Beckett – a writer whose works are usually treated so reverentially that they’re in danger of becoming museum pieces. While this is a very faithful rendition of the play, Pan Pan provide an experience that is genuinely different from anything you’ll have encountered in the theatre before.

Photo by Ros Kavanaugh

Overly protective literary estates should take note–preventing innovation in theatrical presentations of old plays is killing the oeuvres they purport to defend. The idea that an intelligent critic could be saying that about Samuel Beckett is a distressing thing; Beckett was one of the most innovative dramatists of the 20th Century, and was a product of a combative avant-garde that opposed canonization. Whatever the merits of his draconian prescriptions during his life (he once compared having  a woman perform in Godot to having a soprano sing a baritone part), by my recollection, he’s been dead for more than 20 years. If white directors like Bart Sher can now stage August Wilson, surely Mabou Mines should get to have their subway-car Endgame.

Anyway, the point is that under those circumstances, it’s hard to breathe life into Beckett, but Pan Pan has done it, apparently. It turns out that Pan Pan has staged a recording of the performance, in a room replete with rocking chairs and a charming if be-numbing lighting scheme. As Lonergan describes it:

[T]he surprise – and the real pleasure – of this production lies in the design by Aedín Cosgrove. As we enter the Project Space, we’re confronted not with a conventional performance area but with a room full of rocking-chairs. On the wall to the right of the entrance, there’s an enormous bank of lights, which flood the auditorium with a soft yellow and gold haze; on the left a smaller cluster of blue lights soften that mood. To sit between the two sets of lights creates the impression of occupying a space somewhere between an intense and interrogative sunlight and a comforting moonlight – and indeed as the performance progresses, the lights seem to shift us gradually from day to night…What Pan Pan have done, then, is to create a space that is almost entirely free of sensory distractions, allowing us to listen to the play with a profound concentration. That technique allows for a better appreciation of the text, but it also imposes upon the audience many of the sensations that are described by Maddy and the other characters: a sense of blindness, a feeling of isolation despite being surrounded by others, perhaps even a sense of abandonment in space.

Anyway, the entire review is well worth reading, as is Fintan Walsh’s interview with Quinn. Unfortunately I know of no plans for the show to head elsewhere once it finishes its run at Project, Dublin’s historic and rather lovely contemporary arts space, but New York won’t be lacking for Beckett this season. Not only will Dublin’s Gate Theatre be bringing in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape for BAM’s Next Wave, starring John Hurt (which, sadly, I suspect will be overly reverential–how could it not?), but Baryshnikov Arts Center is hosting Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord/Peter Brook‘s Fragments in November, which is surely one of the can’t-miss-it events of the season.
Update: It’s come to my attention (thanks to Sarah Bishop-Stone, thank you!) that Pan Pan will in fact be in NYC in November with The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane at the Skirball Center in November.

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s almost August and with performance in New York about as interesting in hearing yet another comment on the miserable weather, today we look across the Atlantic at an interesting piece that’s up for one night only, August 6, at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre: THEATREclub STOLE Your CLOCK RADIO What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It?

THEATREclub is a young company that, along with like-minded artists such as ThisIsPopBaby, promises to help revitalize contemporary Irish theater, proving the Emerald Isle has more to offer than just retreads of text-heavy theater classics and Gavin Quinn’s Pan Pan. THEATREclub has produced about a half-dozen shows (depending on how you look at it) since 2009, where they made their Dublin Fringe debut. The qualification comes from the fact that THEATREclub have served as much as an incubator as a producing collective, by sponsoring a near annual festival of new works called The Theatre Machine Turns You On at Project Arts Center (read about it in Irish Theatre Magazine).

THEATREclub STOLE Your CLOCK RADIO was the company’s own submission to the first volume of that series, in December 2009, and it toured Ireland in early summer of 2010. Chaotic and churlish, it was a response to the ongoing Irish economic implosion, which transformed what was once the wet dream of American capitalists into the sick-man of Europe, bar Greece. Anyway, the company are bringing it back for a one-night-only performance and party on August 6.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Neighbors" at LA's Matrix Theater Co. in 2010. Photo by I.C. Rapoport.

A couple days ago over at Parabasis, J. Holtham–better known in some circles as 99 Seats–linked to a piece at Howlround by Keith Josef Adkins, Holtham’s co-producer of New Black Fest, a festival of new voices in black theater that premiered last year. I didn’t catch it then, but I intend to this year, because it seems a promising attempt to offer a counterweight to the ridiculous marginalization of black artists and stories in the mainstream American theater, which is guilty of a shocking amount of tokenism and cultural tone-deafness. (It’s also worth pointing out that they’ve launched a series starting this May and going through Juneteenth of new work exploring the legacy of slavery and the Civil War–check it out.) Adkins’ essay, which amounts to something of a year-two mission statement for New Black Fest, is worth reading in its entirety, but something did catch my eye from the first paragraph:

I believe this is truly one of the most exciting times in theater. Playwrights are actually sitting center stage with decision-makers talking about the relevancy of new play development, and, more important, the future of American theater. I, for one, believe this conversation couldn’t come at a better time. On the other side of the planet, Egyptians stand up against a bullying government. Here in the U.S., President Obama turns his nose up to anti-gay marriage laws. In Wisconsin, public workers protest a state budget that would inhibit their bargaining power. So, it brings me much joy to know the American theater, that I often believe to be the most antiquated of all the artistic institutions, has decided to turn the spotlight on the livelihood of the playwright. Why? The playwright’s creative observations often acts a barometer to our humanity, and that, my friends, ideally should incite change. Exciting times, indeed. In fact, I would dare to tag this time as revolutionary, or, at least, a revolution in the making. Believe me when I say I have my fingers crossed.

Got that? Amid all the revolutionary and transformational fervor energizing Adkins, the main aegis of change in black theater will be…playwrights.

Now, I don’t want to further what might be my growing reputation as anti-playwright (for the record, Andy is actually more philosophically against traditional modes of theater than I am). Come on–I welcome playwrights getting to expand their vocabulary and tackle new topics in original ways, and I want a more vibrant, diverse, and engaging theater overall. But if that’s the goal, I’m always surprised the degree to which playwrights are seen as the primary aegis of change, as though someone sitting in a room and writing up well-rounded characters going through some sort of dramatic action is the only way to create theater, the only artist in the production who generate change.

My point here is not to take issue with Adkins on this point, because in my experience, he has little or no reason to expect to find black artists working in other modes of theater production, and that is what I’m really curious about. Holtham himself made note of this fact a few months ago during the entire “what is devised theater, exactly?” discussion, acknowledging, “For whatever reason (or whatever combination of reasons), this work is done mainly by white artists.” But unfortunately he doesn’t really extend his questioning beyond expressing mystification because it “strikes me as odd, since I know so many black artists and artists of color who are well suited to tackling work in this manner,” and acknowledging the New York Neo-Futurists, whose work I’ve yet to catch but who do, apparently, feature a much more diverse group of artists and were the one devised company to participate in the inaugural New Black Fest.

So the question is, why aren’t more African-Americans making theater outside the traditional text-based mode? Devised theater is just one variant of contemporary performance that’s primarily in the theatrical (rather than dance or movement) vein, but from what I’ve seen, it is, even beyond strictly devised theater, rather unusual to find black artists working in these experimental, multidisciplinary modes. And this really struck me reading through Adkins’ essay, particular when he talks about “the waiting game” he and other playwrights (black and not) face trying to get their work produced.

“Over the last four years,” he writes,

I have been in numerous conversations with fellow artists about what to do with this “waiting game” so many of us find ourselves in. I simply mean waiting for larger theater institutions to legitimize our talents and qualify our careers. In truth, many theater artists (color and gender aside) believe we are not a legitimate playwright until the Public Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, the Goodman, etc., stamp their marks of approval across our playwriting souls. That’s not only a grand burden for these institutions to carry, but it’s also a bit delusional for the playwright to expect all and everything from these institutions.

Those sorts of barriers are precisely where ensemble-driven theater comes from–artists tired of beating their heads against a wall, trying to get their work done, who find some like-minded compatriots and start their own companies to produce their own work. And don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s a big difference between waiting to be recognized and have your work produced, and fighting to make things happen. (This is, I should point out, why Adkins started New Black Fest.) I’m sure most of the playwrights Adkins and Holtham talk about have, at some point, self-produced or worked with small companies. But there’s still this glaring question of why more of them don’t deepen and develop those collaborations, rather than assuming that small work is just a stepping stone to doing the sort of big theater plays they really want to.

In the end, necessity being the mother of all invention, much of what we take for granted as “experimental” or “avant-garde” aesthetics grows out of the processes that develop in small companies making work. Anti-acting styles come from not working with trained actors. Eric Dyer of Radiohole started out as a writer, and if I understand it correctly, Radiohole’s first show was a scripted play by him, but like most of the best small experimental companies, at some point Dyer no doubt decided that it was more interesting working with the people he was working with and the process by which the company created its shows changed, from top-down scripting to full-on collaboration. Young Jean Lee started The Shipment doing a lot of writing, most of which didn’t work, and the show was retooled over and over again through developmental experiments with the company until it became the piece it is.

To throw in some personal critical perspective, I’d say that generally the best avant-garde companies start from this perspective: they have limitations because of how they’re going to do these shows, and that necessity informs the aesthetic. We’ve certainly all seen enough bad imitations of Richard Foreman and Big Dance Theater to know that simply mimicking an aesthetic is not a route to success. So again, if experimental modes of theater production are at least in part a natural development of companies working together and deepening their collaboration over time, why aren’t more black artists working in this vein? In the end, it’s a set of tools, not a style, and I’m curious why more black artists don’t employ them.

Off the top of my head, two thoughts occur. First, it may in fact be some function of class. In New York, which is really the hot-bed of experimental non-scripted theater in America, most artists come out of one only a few tracks: Foreman, NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing/Big Dance Theater, Columbia/Anne Bogart/Siti, Mac Wellman/Brooklyn College, and the Wooster Group. Given that two of those are associated with elite universities, and there’s plenty of incest in the scene on top of that, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a lack of diversity in the field if the colleges feeding it are not sufficiently diverse.

But second, I wonder if it is, in fact, a function of the sort of work that a lot of black artists are interested in making. Scripted plays, except for the most radical, tend to rely on some form of naturalism and psychological realism; characters tend to have a wholeness, a solid, grounded identity. Experimental modes tend to favor deconstructive types of characterization, through fragmentary or found texts and a rejection of psychological-realist characterization. So you wind up necessarily with a contrast between an essentialist form of theater in terms of identity, and an anti-essentialist one. Feminist and queer artists tend to reject an essentialist view of identity in favor of play, camp and  identity performance (as Judith Butler would put it), and other ways of attacking the dominant paradigm, which they see as constructing their identity for them. They favor artistic forms which represent a more Protean identity, in other words.

In racial politics, though, the idea of cultural experience is often very important. Representing the “African-American experience,” for instance, becomes a political and moral task. That’s what August Wilson excelled at. And obviously when we talk about a group with a shared experience, particularly a violent and oppressive one, we don’t tend to treat that facet of identity as Protean or performative, but rather essential, defined, and owned. I’m white, in other words; I don’t understand what it’s like to be black in America. I’m a gentile, I don’t understand what it’s like to be Jewish, or understand the legacy of the Holocaust from the perspective. We tend to treat that experience as an essential part of identity, and that’s why it’s still far more shocking to see a blackface performance than a drag one. Political correctness tends to determine whether a concept of identity can be deconstructed, an idea neatly summed up in the title of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, itself an essentialist response to Sartre’s anti-essentialist Anti-Semite and Jew.

There’s certainly plenty of counter-examples in the theater. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s gave rise to a distinctly realist form of gay theater based on that shared experience, but Tony Kushner wound up blowing it out of the water in the early Nineties with Angels in America, and writers like Terrence McNally expanded their vocabularies well beyond traditional well-made plays. George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum was an amazing satiric deconstruction of black realist drama in the late Eighties, but it sort of stands on its own. Mainstream African-American theater, as even Adkins notes, remains beholden to the legacy of August Wilson. But when you compare that sort of realism to the work of an African-American woman like Suzan-Lori Parks, the differences are striking. I don’t think Parks rejects the idea of an essential African-American identity, but her work does explicitly explore how identity is performed, from Venus to The America Play to Topdog/Underdog. And I suspect that has something to do with her gender, and approaching identity from a pair of perspectives that wind up conflicting, much as they did in Ntozake Shange’s best work.

But overall I think these remain dominant paradigms, and I wonder if that’s not ultimately limiting. Again, experimental modes are at their heart a series of techniques and devices that allow artists to explore concepts in a different fashion, and they allow us to expand the realm of things the theater can address. I think we all lose out if entire groups of artists don’t get to explore their experience through these lenses. But of the work I’ve seen and know about in New York over the last year or so, I can really only think of one piece in this vein. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is primarily a playwright who gained a lot of notice with Neighbors at the Public’s LAB Theater a couple years ago, but he was exploring decidedly new territory in his adaptation of The Octoroon at PS122 last spring, in collaboration with Pan Pan’s Gavin Quinn. The collaboration unfortunately spectacularly imploded leading to no shortage of controversy at the time, but what was largely overlooked in the aftermath was how Jacobs-Jenkins was expanding his repertoire well beyond textuality into movement and design through the collaboration. It’s unfortunate it didn’t come together, because from what I understand about what Octoroon was supposed to be, it could have been truly groundbreaking.

There are black artists working in contemporary performance, of course. Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon are giants in the field, to name but two, but interestingly, both came to this sort of performance from dance–rather than theater–backgrounds. Their example demonstrates clearly that such tools can be used to create meaningful explorations of race, identity, and politics, which again leaves me wondering why more people from theater backgrounds don’t seem as interested in pursuing them. Still, that’s just my perspective, and if anyone has any other thoughts to offer (or examples of black artists working outside the standard process I’m unaware of), I’d love to hear.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Until June 1, 2008, the Dublin based Pan Pan Theatre company will perform Oedipus Loves You at PS122. According to Wikipedia, “a call of pan-pan means there is an emergency on board a boat, ship, aircraft or other vehicle but that, for the time being at least, there is no immediate danger to any one’s life or to the vessel itself. This is referred to as a state of urgency”. Whether or not Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn were thinking of this definition when they founded Pan Pan in 1991, Oedipus Loves You successfully breathes urgency and immediateness into the familiar story of Oedipus.

Pan Pan’s production follows the traditional form of Greek tragedy: events take place over the arc of a day, all violence happens off stage, characters sometimes wear masks and, most importantly, there is music and dancing. While the plot follows that of Oedipus (by Seneca) and Oedipus Rex (by Sophocles), there is nothing traditionally classical about the characters in Oedipus Loves You. Tiresias, the blind prophet played by Ned Dennehy (who also plays a naked sphinx on platforms for the opening scene of the play), is a retired rock star who wants to play percussion in Antigone’s and Creon’s indie-rock band called “Gordon Is A Mime”. Antigone, smartly played by Aoife Duffin, is a melancholic teenager divided between her love for her family and the deep desire to be left-the-fuck-alone. Uncle Creon (Dylan Tighe) sniffs coke and can hardly contain his own incestuous impulses towards Antigone. Jocasta (Gina Moxley) does not mind the plague at all- in fact, it makes her sleep better. And Oedipus…well, Oedipus can’t even cook meat right for the family barbecue. Played by Bush Moukarzel, Pan Pan’s Oedipus can hardly contain his own self-pity after he gushes his eyes out. In one of the highlights of the performance, his button down shirt completely drenched in blood, Oedipus remembers the lyrics of his own favorite childhood song: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird. He actually breaks down and cries after singing a few of the first verses.

Playing off of Freud’s writings as well as on contemporary notions of postdramatic theater, Pan Pan’s Oedipus Loves You brings wit and a healthy amount of distance to the theatrical Oedipal “super-plot”. The production is defined by a subtle dark humor that allows for the heavy tragic elements of the plot to exist in tandem with the lightness of irony and detachment. The production is also interesting in terms of set, light and sound design, all of which support the notion of a theater conscious of its theatricality yet fully entertaining, (a)live, and aware of its audience. If you have not seen it yet, don’t miss it!

Pan Pan Theatre’s

Oedipus Loves You

May 21 – June 1

Wednesdays – Sundays at 8

Saturdays at 8 and 11

Tickets from $20

$15 (students/seniors)

$10 (P.S. 122 members)

Popularity: 1% [?]