Theater for the New City presents world premiere of Shulman's first puppet play November 10 to December 4.
WHERE AND WHEN:
November 10 to December 4
Theater for the New City (Cino Theater), 155 First Avenue (at E. 10th Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City
Thurs-Sat@ 8:00 PM, Sundays at 3:00 PM. (No shows 11/24-25)
$15 general admission; Box office (212) 254-1109, www.theaterforthenewcity.net
Runs approx. 70 minutes.
Critics invited on or after Friday, November 11
DETAILS AND ARTIST INFO:
"Deathscape" by Misha Shulman is a multi-media, puppet-centered, Kafka-meets-Cocteau-in-A-Yellow-Submarine play about dreams where life changes and fears meet. It is inspired by Shulman's own dreams, Jungian imagery and the biblical story of Jacob. Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, will present this new work in its Cino Theater November 8 to December 4.
Performed by two actors and four puppeteers, the play will include a combination of Indonesian-style shadow work, live overhead projector artwork and three-dimensional puppets. Directed by the author, with puppets created by Jane Catherine Shaw, Zvi Sahar, Andrew Benincasa, Katey Parker and Alexa Elmakki.
The play was developed during Shulman's period as Writer in Residence for Toronto's multi-award-winning Crow's Theatre. In straightforward prose, Shulman took five powerful dreams he had during a "wild year" in which his life changed radically, and strung them together as a single narrative. In an attempt to touch upon what Carl Jung termed The Collective Unconscious, Shulman then changed the characters of the dreams from people in his own life to archetypical icons such as Sigmund Freud, Osama Bin Laden, Mary Magdalene and the Dalai Lama.
To understand the piece, it helps to know a little about Shulman. He was raised in Jerusalem and served in the Israeli army as a Commander in charge of Education. His plays often confront Jewish ethical conundrums like national duty and collective guilt from the viewpoint of a liberal Israeli dissident. A New Yorker now, Shulman's dreams, reflecting world events and major personal life changes, are refracted through religious imagery in his own interpretation. He analyzes his dreams from what he considers archetypal religious precedents: those of Jacob in the book of Genesis, particularly the dream of the spotted goat, which is regarded as a dream of a family splitting and of destiny for the young. That dream occurred on Jacob's departure with his wives from the household of Laban. Shulman reflects, "Of his three dreams, this is the one that relates best to the fear of change and the dichotomy of returning to childhood versus creating yourself anew as an adult." According to the Talmud, a dream is one-sixtieth of a prophecy, and "Deathscape" is also meant to suggest that relationship.
The play also addresses the phenomenon of collective change. Shulman compares acceptance of his own changes to our adaptation to global "new realities." He writes, "The terror in the play was something I thought a lot about in the context of the 2009 war in Gaza, the way Israel has dealt with Hamas and the USA with Al Qaeda." Change, he says, is both symbolic and practical. He is painting his dreams with puppets to illustrate "the line between personal and collective experience." Dreams, he says, can help us loosen our grip on symbols and transform our attitudes toward different members of our community. Puppets are meant to illustrate this process.
The audience will experience a collective dream with a linear narrative. The play begins with Freud sending a dreamer on a journey to find an old friend, who has a drug that will bring him back in touch with the things he is denying. As the play progresses, the examination of fear and denial takes the dreamer through open landscapes, old memories, military checkpoints, and into the innermost chambers of the earth. There he meets Mary Magdalene and her assistant, a bat. Finally the dreamer encounters Medea, in the form of a puppet made of water, cloth and tree-branches, who sends the dreamer on a psychedelic inner battle, from which he emerges ready to accept the dramatic changes in his life. His overcoming fear is symbolized, in one instance, by Bin Laden (or rather, his beard) singing a Jewish prayer for the memory of the dead.
To simulate how we can drive our own dreams, much of the play's soundscape will be generated from the brain waves of the audience, as detected through an "Audience Brainwave Sonification Device" developed at Princeton's PEAR Lab. Operated by Robert Alexander, a NASA fellow and scientist, it has a "random number generator" that drives music in styles ranging from white noise to sweet computer generated music. Brain waves of a group of people have been proven to affect a flow of random numbers. As the numbers driving the sound go up or down during the performance, depending on the audience's state of consciousness, their trends (waves) will be reflected on a screen, so the audience can actually see its impact.
