{"id":1816,"date":"2010-03-13T00:16:55","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T08:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2010-03-13T01:04:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T09:04:14","slug":"theater-of-the-absurd-for-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2010\/03\/13\/theater-of-the-absurd-for-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Theater of the absurd for 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s theater month for me, with the Belfry Theatre<\/a>‘s SPARK Festival<\/a> leading the way.<\/p>\n

Tonight I saw Tiny Apocalypse<\/a> (video excerpt here<\/a>), a powerful one-woman play by Camille Gingras, in which an office drone named Rita Downenlower (“down and lower”) slowly comes undone.\u00a0 The play is pitch-perfect: nothing over-the-top or campy or horribly lugubrious, just pure existential absurdity<\/a> in the spirit of Beckett or Ionesco, albeit in tune with the peculiar details of our times.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo of Cherise Clarke by Mike Bernard<\/p><\/div>\n

~<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

It stars the multi-talented artist and actress Cherise Clarke<\/a> (her website is in progress, but this page<\/a> gives some biographical background). Clarke plays the part of Rita perfectly – I laughed at Rita, but cared about her, felt distanced from and analyzed her, but was drawn into her drama. The set design and incorporation of video is a knock-out.<\/p>\n

Imagine something like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil<\/a>, except stripped down to just the essentials and to just one woman going mad. Tiny Apocalypse<\/em> is a bit like that. All in all, definitely worth taking in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s theater month for me, with the Belfry Theatre‘s SPARK Festival leading the way. Tonight I saw Tiny Apocalypse (video excerpt here), a powerful one-woman play by Camille Gingras, in which an office drone named Rita Downenlower (“down and lower”) slowly comes undone.\u00a0 The play is pitch-perfect: nothing over-the-top or campy or horribly lugubrious, just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1823],"tags":[15007,15008,3100,15006],"class_list":["post-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-canada","tag-belfry_theatre","tag-plays","tag-theater","tag-tiny_apocalypse"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1824,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}