New York City
Plucked from the audience, three contestants live (and die) their way through a myriad of incarnations as they compete for the ultimate prize, perfect enlightenment. In Paul Mullin’s An American Book of the Dead: The Game Show, the entire history of the United States becomes their playing field – from Jamestown to Silicon Valley and beyond. Amidst incarnations, the contestants visit Bardo worlds – strange places between death and rebirth where Stonewall Jackson and Harriet Tubman are husband and wife, and where patriot poet Walt Whitman eternally argues with World War II traitor laureate, Ezra Pound. When the contestants start to reincarnate as each other, we begin to understand that enlightenment is both here and nowhere … both a trillion light-years and one mere blink away.
Final performance: April 7, 2024