Daniel Fish: White Noise

Daniel Fish, Tony Award-nominated director for his revival of Oklahoma! on Broadway, brings a new work freely inspired by Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise to NYU Skirball. The 70-minute performance extracts its text entirely from the novel’s teeming lists, creating an obsessive reduction of the novel’s prescient themes: rampant consumerism, environmental disaster, guns, media saturation, underground conspiracy, fear of death, and the disintegration of the nuclear family.

Originally staged in 2018 by Theater Freiburg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen in Germany, White Noise is performed by actor Bruce Mackenzie with live accompaniment by composer and drummer Bobby Previte. Jim Findlay’s video design features 19 teenagers from Freiburg, Germany, and is projected on Andrew Leiberman’s monumental set which encapsulates Mackenzie in the center of the image.