Celebrated French playwright and director Pascal Rambert will be in residence at PS21 from December 6–10, adapting and rehearsing two of his masterful plays: The Art of Theater, performed by Jim Fletcher, and With My Own Hands, featuring Ismail ibn Connor. Nicholas Elliott, who has translated numerous Rambert works as well as theater pieces by Olivier Py and others, will assist with the English versions. The residency will culminate on December 10 with work-in-progress stagings of both plays, ahead of their presentation at PS21, as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in January 2022. Please contact us for details about attendance and tickets to the work-in-progress showcase. The Art of Theater, composed in 2007, is a manifesto about the nature of dramatic acting, spoken by a single actor (Fletcher) who addresses, not the audience, but his dog, who patiently attends to his master’s voice. The audience, in effect, eavesdrops on the monologue. Fletcher, who co-starred with Kate Moran in Rambert’s two-character Love’s End (Clôture de l’Amour), previously appeared at PS21 in 2019, in the title role of Compagnie l’heliotrope’s Pollock. Rambert wrote the original version of With My Own Hands for Eric Doye in 1993; it premiered on a rooftop at the Université de Dijon. Since then, he has adapted this protean meditation on the human condition, a soliloquy uttered by a wounded psyche on the brink of suicide, for a series of settings and performers, including the American actor Kate Moran in 2007. At the time, he said, “I wrote this text to be played by both men and women, young and old.” At PS21, Conner, who has performed widely in Centre Dramatique National Orléans' production of Jean Genet's Splendid’s and many other theatrical works, will embody the role of protagonist of this searing, enigmatic monologue.
Date and Time
Friday Dec 10, 2021
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EST
Location
PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century PO Box 321, Chatham, NY 12037
Website
Contact Information
boxoffice@ps21chatham.org