Brains and Puppets

Untitled Theater Company #61 and Evolve Company present Brains and Puppets,
written by Edward Einhorn, and directed, designed & performed by Tanya Khordoc & Barry Weil.

Untitled Theater Company #61 and Evolve Company are collaborating to present The Boy Who Wanted to be a Robot and The Taste of Blue, two plays examining the conditions of autism and synesthesia, respectively. In both of the pieces, the protagonist is a child with a neurological condition, and the audience is invited to enter into that child’s world and experience that child’s experience. The plays are a playful examination of how the brain works, both for those of us who are “neurotypical” and for those who are not.

The Boy Who Wanted to be a Robot is a Pinocchio tale in reverse presented as a fairy tale from a foreign culture — the culture of people with Asperger’s Syndrome. Enacted by Barry Weil with a cast of puppets whose design is inspired by the work of artists with autism, the play follows the adventures of a boy who grows up surrounded by robots and then is at sea when he finds himself in a world of humans. He struggles for logic and order among people whose emotions are sometimes confusing to him.

The Taste of Blue is about a teenage girl who can taste color and see music. She has synesthesia, a condition in which the senses are mixed, a condition shared by many artists, from Kandinsky to Nabakov. Tanya Khordoc brings us into her world and shows us the incredible landscape within her mind.