Alan Smithee Directed This Play: Triple Feature

Astronauts, Bolsheviks, and middle-American families mingle on a stage littered with lawn chairs, telephones, fur coats, and pistols in this collision of early-20th-century Moscow, midcentury Paris, and late-20th-century Houston. Big Dance Theater directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar sample fragments of iconic film scripts and novels, divorced from their narrative contexts, to create a kinetic collage of political rhetoric, pathos, paranoia, and suburban love. With a titular nod to the Hollywood pseudonym for directors who disavow their work after creative interference, Alan Smithee Directed This Play: Triple Feature contemplates the slippery nature of creative control, history, its fictions, and the inextricable link between the personal and the historical.