NIGHTMARES: a demonstration of the Sublime / LJWorld.com

Details

Categories: Performance art, Theater
Event posted: March 14, 2013
Last updated: May 24, 2013

Event details

Saturday, May 25, 2013, 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m.
Inge Theatre, 1530 Naismith Drive in Murphy Hall, KU campus, Lawrence
Cost: $5 - $25
Age limit: 18+

Buran Theatre returns to Lawrence Buran Theatre their original theatre work "NIGHTMARES: a demonstration of the Sublime." The production recently played to sold-out houses and critical acclaim at The Brick in Brooklyn, NY, prompting NYtheatre.com’s founder Martin Denton to call it “an experience that the thoughtful student of contemporary American theater ought to undertake.” The piece situates itself between terror and comedy (the sublime), beneath the gaze of Henry Fuseli's iconic painting, and in the midst of an enveloping soundscape to plumb the extremities of our contemporary condition and posit the question: are we still capable of being overwhelmed? Initiating at the birth of the modern sublime—the summer of 1816, when literary heavyweights Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Jon Polidori convened on Lake Geneva to create their literary shapeshifters, namely Frankenstein's Monster and the Vampyr—the performance takes on the overwhelming anxiety of confronting nature and ourselves in the 21st century, an era that seemingly reaches for zeros. PRAISE FOR NIGHTMARES “…tremendous scope…[an] expressionistic critical mass…Vehemently defying categorization, “NIGHTMARES: a demonstration of the Sublime” is, in a word, overwhelming. Critic’s score: A.” – Mitch Montgomery, Backstage Magazine “NIGHTMARES is chaotic, anarchic, and fully demanding of its audience’s engagement. It is also enormously fun, and funny; with a serious—profound, even—sense of purpose and vision that creeps up on you slowly and then jolts you to attention with its sudden immediacy and clarity.” – Martin Denton, nytheatre.com “Every time we are introduced to a place or character it seems to change or disappear and, like peek-a-boo, reappear. Or. Not. … The cascade of lazzis eludes whatever narrative impulses we still have, leaving us in a dream-like free fall.” – Max Cramer, Culturebot "NIGHTMARES will wake you up." - Tabitha Vidaurri, Brooklyn Exposed