Give Up! Start Over! and Howl

TEAM, which won the 2005 Fringe First award last summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, presents its award-winning play Give Up! Start Over! (In the darkest of times I look to Richard Nixon for hope) on a double-bill with the adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem Howl.

Created by actor Jessica Almasy, who stars, and Rachel Chavkin, who directs, Give Up! Start Over! is the tale of a woman who has swallowed her television. Isolated in an 8-foot box and possessed by characters snatched from her television – reality TV contestants, glossy celebrities, and most notably President Richard Nixon – she battles furiously to test whether a life has meaning if no one else is watching.

Howl, adapted and directed by Rachel Chavkin from the groundbreaking poem by Allen Ginsberg, acquired a cult following on college campuses in recent years with its wildly athletic staging (what bebop jazz would look like if put into human form). The play, set at the poem’s first reading in San Francisco in fall 1955 (when a drunk Jack Kerouac stood in the crowd shouting “Go! Go! Go!”) combines the poem with excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.