Mabou Mines

Lee Breuer directs...

Director, writer, and founding member of this legendary theater company, Lee Breuer balances compelling theatrics with penetrating human insight, an appreciation of classical mythology with genius originality.   Mabou Mines Dollhouse Red Beads Choephorae (The Libation Bearers) The Gospel at Colonus Lee Breuer projects in development

Sharon Fogarty directs...

A next-generation Mabou Mines member writes and directs a work of startling originality.   Cara Lucia

Mabou Mines Dollhouse (8 actors, 1 musician, puppets) This Obie Award-winning production continues Breuer’s series of reinvented classics – most recently Peter and Wendy (OBIEs, Outer Critics Circle) – and brings Ibsen’s 19th Century feminism into an equation of power and scale. Shorter-than-average male actors (up to 4 feet tall) contrast women of normal height. The actors perform on a dollhouse set with child-sized furniture. Eve Beglarian's score, a collage of Edvard Grieg's piano works, accompanies each scene and Maude Mitchell’s Obie Award-winning performance brings rare depth and unusual perspective to the role of Nora. Mabou Mines DollHouse turns bourgeois tragedy into high comedy with deep political bite.

“A passionate allegory that works – and plays – on many levels. The men embody small-minded convention and stunted possibilities. The women's big forms exude trapped energy, but they also remind us of the outsize roles that women played in the Victorian imagination. There they were angels, monsters, delectable maidens and decadent temptresses. Mr. Povinelli makes us feel Torvald's repressive sexual virility at every turn. Ms. Mitchell keeps us tense to the point of anguish with her ingratiating little cries and compulsive movement. The exaggerations are true to Ibsen. Emotional violence always pulses beneath his stern prose.” – The New York Times “...an amazing piece of work. The production is so incredibly packed - with story, theme, metaphor, subtext, visuals, meaningful movement, and delicious acting - that you will be turning it over in your head for some time.” – The Charleston City Paper (of Spoleto USA 2005 engagement)

An investigation into the art of opera and puppetry, Red Beads explores a haunting fantasy centering on an enduring literary theme: a young girl’s coming-of-age, in which she is promised her mother’s necklace of 13 red beads on her 13th birthday. The daughter’s ascension to womanhood and her mother’s corresponding demise is marked by a to-the-death battle with the mother swelling to a witch-like sentinel at the portal of womanhood as the girl clings to her beads.

Red Beads uses vertical choreography – a synthesis of aerial acrobatics, contact improvisation and Japanese ceremonial dance – and wind puppetry to animate this symbolic tale. This is a visually stunning and aurally haunting fable evoking the dreamscape of Edgar Allan Poe. Premiering at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City in September 2005.

The Gospel at Colonus Featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama Conceiver and director, Lee Breuer. Composer, Bob Telson Produced by Dovetail Productions This unique musical theater production opened BAM’s Next Wave Festival and continued to Broadway and international fame. One of our civilization’s most enduring tragic tales, this timeless presentation of the Oedipus myth in powerful Gospel form bridges race and creed and is guaranteed to move audiences emotionally and physically. Recently featured on the 70th Anniversary season of New York's renowned Apollo Theater. “The Gospel at Colonus has won a kind of immortality for itself that’s rare on our fickle stage and it has lost none of its grace and fire. If it fails to stir you, you may want to check your own vital signs.” - The San Francisco Examiner

Cara Lucia       Writer/director Sharon Fogarty          Composer, Carter Burwell       Featuring, Ruth Maleczech A fragmentary, impressionistic version of the life of Lucia Joyce (1907-1982), the daughter of James Joyce. Joyce is said to have believed that Lucia inherited his creativity and that his finishing Finnegans Wake would somehow ward off her illness. Featuring one of America's greatest actresses, Ruth Maleczech, in a multi-media context, Cara Lucia is a powerful exploration of the forces at work in the life of a most enigmatic woman. A Mabou Mines classic in the making! Youth Advisory: All Mabou Mines productions are appropriate for adults and mature youth