Workshop 2024, Premiere 2025
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Barcelona, Map of Shadows is a mysterious story of the rented rooms in a rented apartment in an upper middle class neighborhood, and its terminally ill lease holder whose dying request is to be left alone with his wife. In 5 perplexing scenes, he and his wife ask their tenants – a French teacher, a second string soccer player/security guard, and an immigrant line cook – to leave, as a radio broadcast of Callas singing La Boheme plays intermittently in the background.   It is also a story of the city itself, on the brink of losing its identity to globalization. The characters’ identities are far from fixed; their shifting subjectivities undo the social codings of high and low, masculine and feminine, center and the margin. Far from being a story of nostalgia for a city mourning its own loss, it instead transports you to those mysterious, marginal, concealed spaces that exist in the realm of everyday urban life where identity is always elusive.

Barcelona, Map of Shadows is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.