Theaterlab presents
ORPHEUS & EURYDICE BY THE TRIP
Theaterlab
357 West 36t St, 3rd Floor
NY NY
16-20 July 2015
Text and direction by Tom Dugdale
Performed by Joshua Brody, Miranda Dainard, Tom Dugdale,
Paul Marino, Joey Odom, Jenni Putney
The Trip is a San
Diego-based contemporary theater company founded and led by Joshua Kahan
Brody and Tom Dugdale which strives for
interdisciplinary, ensemble-driven theater that challenges traditional
boundaries of narrative and space. That is what their press says.
What
they really are is extraordinary! The Trip’s ORPHEUS & EURYDICE
takes a classic myth and brings it wholly down to earth, finding new meaning and
making it applicable to our current times. Using video, film, music and a
deceptively casual, interactive method, the audience is pulled into the
performance. That makes it sound busy, but it is not. It is done so simply, so
cleanly, it doesn’t even really feel like a performance. It feels completely
natural to be experiencing what is actually kind of strange.
The walk
out of the underworld is told simultaneously by a film projected on the back
wall and by the actors sitting in front of the film. Jenni Putney
and Tom Dugdale are exquisitely touching without being
precious. Having the ending be a quiet end of a relationship rather than a
Tragic End to an Epic makes so much sense, that it is a revelation.
I
hope The Trip makes more trips to NYC. I can’t wait to see what
they do next!
- Jean Tait -