Part of FringeNYC: An immersive experience: Only 20 audience members per show. Lie down for projected videos and uncommon intimacy. Animation plays a dreamscape overhead as this psychologist and Virginia Woolf scholar tells a story of love, betrayal, redemption, and...marrying a man just like Daddy. More…
Categories: Solo Show, Multi-Media, Local. Written by Ilana Simons.
FROM THE ARTIST:
An intimate audience of twenty lies down in a handmade tent for highly imaginative storytelling that evokes a proud and fantastical escape. Lying with strangers is electrifying, and recollects sleepovers in the backyard, with the awed stargazing of those nights. The writer and performer of this one-woman show, Ilana Simons, is a psychologist, literature professor, and animator who wrote this psychologically-rich narrative after her divorce, as a way to name childhood longings, or to learn why she married a man just like her father. She stitched the cloth walls of this tent and animated the intricate videos that project onto them. Simons embeds herself in the tent alongside her audience members to deliver an uncommonly evocative and beautiful reverie of love and loss.
Ilana Simons is a clinical psychologist, Virginia Woolf scholar, and animator. She is the founder of Tin House Reels, an online site for short videos at Tin House magazine and a writer for Psychology Today. Her short animations have premiered at Sundance and been featured online at sites like Hyperallergic and Electric Literature, where her short animated film about Haruki Murakami garnered 30,000 views. She is the author of A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (Penguin), and collaborated with Alain de Botton on his Great Writers series. She has performed her work at The Flea, the Nuyorican Poetry Café, and the Moth and lives in Brooklyn.
Features artistic contributions from Eamonn Farrell, director and media designer of Anonymous Ensemble, who has worked extensively with Mabou Mines, Jessica Scott, and with theaters like HERE.
This is an immersive show with a limited number of audience members let in each night. a special storytelling experience.
See it if You are interested in exploring creative and psychological relationships between women and men and the relationship to art, and enjoy dance
Don't see it if You have a short attention span, average or lower intelligence or a bad back or cannot lie on a hard floor for extended period
See it if You enjoy alternative forms of storytelling - this one involves projections, movement, and lots of the author's original and interesting art
Don't see it if You find "memoir" style narratives to be self-involved; you have a knee-jerk aversion to stories about "first world problems"
See it if You enjoy abstraction more than clear narrative - it's like an abstract painting had a baby with a multi-media art installation.
Don't see it if You can't lay on a yoga mat for an hour without body pains.
See it if You want to see immersive theater and cool projections in a tent.
Don't see it if You hate performance art or anything outside of the traditional mold.
See it if You love visual artistry mixed with an intelligent script and unique experiences
Don't see it if You find it difficult to lie on a yoga mat and watch the screens above and in front of you
See it if are in love
Don't see it if you hate your ex
See it if You want to see a genius at work! Ilana is a genius!
Don't see it if You want a light musical or a comedy.
See it if You want inventive unique intimate theater experience. Magnificent!
Don't see it if you only like musical comedies.
See it if You are smart, love Woolf, hate patriarchal men, have a dysfunctional family, enjoy unusual experiences, or want to watch the ceiling.
Don't see it if you have problems lying on your back for an hour.