"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" – Bertolt Brecht
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Over the course of a mysterious, hallucinatory night, the Devil and his entourage pay a midnight visit to Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose recent work Molière has just been shut down by the authorities. By magic, these characters, having escaped from Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, transform themselves and perform the play, transposing the playwright’s 1930s attack on censorship and hypocrisy in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the America of today: a government paralyzed by vicious partisanship and a society obsessed with celebrity. Is the Artist a revolutionary and provocateur or does the machinery of mass culture co-opt every act, even the act of subversion itself?
Moskva is a comic, macabre fantasy, based on the Russian masterpiece The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
On a hot spring afternoon, the Devil and his entourage, trailing fire and chaos in their wake, emerge from the shadows of the underworld and weave themselves into the absurd and brutal realities of today’s Moscow. They encounter lovers, mafia king-pins, drug-dealers, hit-men, a crippled novelist, Pontius Pilate, Christ, and various bewildered apparatchiks of Putin’s Russia.
This smart, ruthlessly funny play, tracks Ophelia’s impossible journey to bridge that vast space. It is a postmodern tale of love, sex, porn, and politics in the fragmented world of our confused emotions and our modern, global, virtual sexuality.
Two naked specimens in a cage. Visitors come and go, fascinated by them, arguing and wondering about these creatures.
Eugene Ionesco’s brilliant absurdist farce unfolds in a universe dislodged from logic and even common sense.
Orestes faces trial for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Helen of Troy, the Kato Kaelin of the pageant, shows up in swimwear and platform sandals, while Electra anxiously twirls en pointe. Apollo hosts this media circus like a Valley dude in boardshorts, but he can’t match the mojo of Menelaus, who delivers a rockin’ cover of the Bo Diddley salvo “I’m a Man.”
“Filthy Talk” takes a poke at the art world and its often decorative pretensions, and the world of male/female relations it presents is “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” on steroids—mega steroids.
…A series of fragmented exchanges that often take the form of inchoate expressions of rage twinned with frustrated awareness of a lack of control.
In this wicked piece of satire on fidelity and honor, two couples mistakenly believe they have betrayed each other. The more they argue, scheme, plot, and attempt to revenge themselves, the more deeply they get entangled in their own delusions.
A profoundly despondent fellow wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged…