Mano a Mano

Staged in the round with the audience immersed in the action, Mano a Mano needles Anglo-Saxon epics with personal anecdote, pseudo-history, Antonio Banderas movies, tangents about the Romans, boxing, and stories about New Jersey. Over the course of 90 minutes, writer and performer Paul Pinto embodies multiple characters across a five-octave range of timbres: sweet, throaty, and viscerally guttural.

In Mano a Mano, Pinto poses the question, “What if Sir Gawain, a character in the Arthurian legend, and Beowulf, the legendary Scandinavian hero, were fighting over killing the same dragon?” He answers with an all-encompassing performance of virtuosic chants, rants, song, and spectacle—bobbing and weaving between passages of puckishly quick verbiage and aching melancholia.

The action of Mano a Mano takes place on an epic circular platform evoking King Arthur’s Round Table with some audience members seated as guests. They, along with Pinto, are surrounded by a mix of wild saxophone and percussion improvisation performed by Erin Rogers (sax), Zach Herchen (sax), and Dennis Sullivan (percussion).