ISOLDE
Turning the codes of the traditional love comedy inside out, New-Yorker Richard Maxwell is back at the FTA with a smooth avant-garde show that sensitively plunges us in the female psyche.
After the triumph of House in 2001 and the shock of Neutral Hero in 2011, Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players are back at the FTA with their mysteriously unconventional theatre. This time, the codes of the traditional love comedy are turned inside out while poking fun in passing at some of our cherished North American values.
What happens when a great actress loses her memory? Stuck between an inability to remember her lines and the loss of her past and all her memories, Isolde, a woman very much of our times, decides to escape the clutches of fate by building her dream home, a fortress to protect her fragility. But in cheating on her husband (a generous, down-to-earth building contractor) with the poetic, visionary architect, she is thrown into a much bigger story, one that can only be clarified – if at all – by the myth of Tristan and Isolde.
CREDITS
PRODUCED BY NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY RICHARD MAXWELL
PERFORMED BY JIM FLETCHER (PATRICK) + BRIAN MENDES (UNCLE JERRY) + CHRIS SULLIVAN (MASSIMO) + TORY VAZQUEZ (ISOLDE)
SET DESIGN SASCHA VAN RIEL
ORIGINAL COSTUME DESIGN ROMY SPRINGSGUTH
ADDITIONAL COSTUME PIECES KAYE VOYCE
LIGHTING TECHNICIAN ZACK TINKELMAN
WITH THE SUPPORT OF NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS (WASHINGTON) + ALLIANCE OF RESIDENT THEATERS NEW YORK – CREATIVE SPACE GRANT + ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION NEW YORK THEATER PROGRAM + FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS (NEW YORK)
WRITTEN BY PAUL LEFEBVRE
TRANSLATED BY NEIL KROETSCH
PREMIERED AT RIVER-TO-RIVER FESTIVAL, NEW YORK, JUNE 30, 2013
RICHARD MAXWELL (NEW YORK)
“NO PRETENDING!” THEATRE
The director and playwright Richard Maxwell subverts from within the conventions of American theatrical realism to create a theatre of the real dominated by the performative dimension of dramatic art – the concrete reality of the actor onstage – but without neglecting its fictional, narrative and mimetic dimensions.
