About This Show
An award-winning pair of intricate, urgent pieces blurring the boundary between experimental theater and avant-garde music, both written by internationally-known composer and company member Rick Burkhardt. Great Hymn of Thanksgiving takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced with fragmented news reports, scraps from the Army prayer manual, faux-Middle-Eastern folk tales, and disembodied cries of emergency. The sculpted sounds of the table itself — scooting chairs, singing wineglasses, squeaking forks — force this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.In Conversation Storm, three friends from three sides of the political spectrum unwillingly argue their way through a ticking time bomb scenario, revising, dissecting, and even brutalizing their own positions in the process — but time has either stopped or entered an ugly loop, and as the friends assign and reassign roles, the scenario begins to dissolve the boundaries between real and hypothetical, past and future, day and night.Winner: “Best New Play,” San Francisco Fringe 2007, and “Best of the Fest” New York FRIGID Festival 2008.