Premiere: January 8, 2009
ToRoNaDa – Mabou Mines’ Studio – NYC
As part of “Under the Radar Festival”

Written & Directed by Lee Breuer
Featuring: Ruth Maleczech & Greg Mehrten

“…fun and horrific, intellectual and sophomoric, coarse and rich…free-floating Rorschach tests – acted by performers of immense focus and stamina…”
Bob Shuman – stagevoices.com

“Breuer is, at heart, a trickster, a merry prankster playing at play, realizing that fun is serious, existential, business.”
Andy Horwitz – Culturebot.org

“Mabou Mines has trained us during decades to expect provocative and insightful shows that make us think. This one makes us laugh and think at the same time, the most absorbing combination.”
Saviana Stanescu – nytheatre.com

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Music Composed by – Jay Ansill
Puppetry Direction & Design – Jessica Scott
Lighting Design – Jason Boyd
Sound Design – Ken Travis
Video – Eamonn Farrell
Costume Design – Meganne George
Mask Design – Julie Archer
Producer for Mabou Mines – Joe Stackell

DESCRIPTION:

Pataphysics Penyeach is an evening of irreverent theater (a la Alfred Jarry) written and directed by avant-garde legend Lee Breuer: Summa Dramatica – a spiritual acting lesson, and Porco Morto – an elegy for Ponzi Porco PhD, pig of the avant-garde.

Delivered as a lecture/postscript to William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, Summa sends up and up and up into the ionosphere “Acting-in-Itself”. Porco Morto is a post mortem for Ponzi Porco PhD, avant-garde pig and author of “The Lonely Planet Guide to Heaven on Earth”. Porco is resurrected, via a bunraku puppet, to rhapsodize upon his sexual attraction for The New York Times.

OBIE award-winners Ruth Maleczech and Greg Mehrten star as the four-armed bovine Goddess and the old pot-head pig…an intimate of Hunter Thompson…who fell in Love with The New York Times when he realized he had always wanted to screw the system.

PRODUCTION HISTORY:

Development workshops:
The Flea Theater – February-March, 2005
Brown University – April, 2005
The Actors’ Studio – March, 2008

Premiere:
ToRoNaDa (Mabou Mines’ Studio)- As part of Under the Radar Festival January 8-18, 2009

Touring:
4th Street Theatre of NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP January 13-31, 2010 (A Project of the Jonathan Larson Lab)

Special Funding for Pataphysics Penyeach was provided by: The Jim Henson Foundation, Piece by Piece Productions, Inc. and The Natalie Zinn Haar Foundation.