Panic (How to Be Happy)

For his 35th anniversary production, director Richard Foreman goes for broke with 75 minutes of total madness. In Panic (How to Be Happy), a band of eccentric desperados tries to provoke self-enlightenment through ritual sex, magic, mountain climbing, and convulsive dancing as they invoke “The Old Man of the Mountain” who bestows gifts amidst multiple catastrophes. The music of Mahler, Schoenberg, and punk rock, punctuated by howling wolves, echoes between the Carpathian peaks as madness and mysticism dissolve into an ocean of frenzied love.