The theater company Polybe + Seats is proud to announce its spring 2010 production of A THOUSAND THOUSAND SLIMY THINGS. Conceived and directed by Artistic Director Jessica Brater and written by Company Member Katya Schapiro with the company, the production will have a limited engagement of 9 performances only at the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge (290 Conover Street at Pier 44) in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A THOUSAND THOUSAND SLIMY THINGS fuses nautical mythology and literature with oceanography and marine biology, hoping to inspire meditation on the literal plasticizing of the ocean habitat.
A man floats on the open ocean, clinging to his best friend – an ever-shrinking bit of iceberg. He gazes below the surface of the water and thinks he sees…mermaids performing Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea? Elsewhere, a salty sea captain shuttles back and forth from the miles-wide vortex in the North Central Pacific known as the Garbage Patch, delivering messages in bottles and smuggling the impossible. Elsewhere still, a marooned sea creature rants and a strange disease is spreading. All will collide in a mythic place called Florida.
Inspired by the Weeki Wachee Mermaid Park – one of the nation’s oldest roadside attractions (and smallest cities) – A THOUSAND THOUSAND SLIMY THINGS is a floating fantasia, staged on board a docked barge in Brooklyn’s historic Red Hook District. The production carries the energy of Earth Day forward and incorporates: material culled from sources ranging from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick to oceanographic blogs and transcripts of first-hand interviews with the Weeki Wachee mermaids; original material generated by over 20 actors, writers, and designers over two years; and a portable set composed of reclaimed plastic objects. In the midst of the world’s debate about how to reverse humanity’s global impact – or whether there’s been any significant impact at all – Polybe + Seats confronts a frightening possibility: What if there’s nothing to be done? What does one do in the face of inevitable, unavoidable change?
A THOUSAND THOUSAND SLIMY THINGS – supported in part by a grant from The Nancy Quinn Fund, a project of A.R.T/New York – features Carmel Amit, Elaine O’Brien, Jenni Lerche, Sarah Sakaan, Eugene Santiago, Hilary Thomas, and Ari Vigoda, has set, prop, and puppet design by Eli Kaplan-Wildmann, lighting design by Natalie Robin, costume design by Bevan Dunbar, original music by Jason Binnick, choreography by Lindsay Torrey, dramaturgy by Miriam Felton-Dansky and Stacey Cooper McMath, and stage management by Ai Ling Loo.
[April-May 2010]
Waterfront Museum and Barge, Red Hook, Brooklyn
shown at Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, April 2009.
In residence Mabou Mines, March 2009
Bushwick Starr, August 2007
Read the press at Papermag.com and the Village Voice and Gothamist and the Huffington Post and Theatre Knights (& Daze). Download PDFs from The Brooklyn Rail here: Waterlogged in Red Hook and Saving Their Tales