The Paper Industry
Little Fictions
June 28 - July 18, 2010
Little Fictions is a (fairly) straight play in which four strangers in an apartment all meet for the first time. One plays the piano, two talk a lot but care very differently, at least one among them has a secret and they all lie. The play focuses on how our identities can be constructed out of little fictions we imagine ourselves in, and how that relates to the way other people see us. Little Fictions explores “who we are” as an abstract and shifting landscape occupying the common ground between ourselves and another.
Written, directed and designed by: Jamie Peterson
Performers: Haley Greenstein, Laura K. Nicoll, Ilan Bachrach, and Brian Smolin
3 Workshop Showings:
July 15, 16, 17 (Thurs-Sat) at 8 pm
Tickets $15 – purchase on Brown Paper Tickets
The initial design ideas for Little Fictions will experiment with the formalized voyeurism of the normal theatrical arrangement. The audience in this piece must engage in a more active form of viewing, dictating how they will watch the performance unfolding. The idea is to create a space that cannot be seen by the audience directly, thereby creating a natural barrier between the stage “truth” and the actual truth of the space. In one iteration of this idea, the audience is seated at cafe tables surrounding a closed set and served cocktails as the action unfolds out of view. Each table is set with a small television hooked into closed circuit cameras observing the space. The audience is encouraged throughout the piece to also get up and wander around the closed room, peering into the action from windows and cracks in the walls, from the eyes of paintings and two sided mirrors. Little Fictions is a play about how we change in a given circumstance, how we adapt and above all about who we are when we’re alone.
Sources for this piece come from William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life, which discusses identity as a kind of theatricality. Also, we will be investigating a cultural observation about the malleability of identity in an age of social networking, online dating and hyper-consumable culture, all of which in some way reduces the nuances of identity to a set of binary states, a set of criteria that defines a person more empirically. Little Fictions seeks to explore this new landscape of identity and what its impact may be when we start defining ourselves instead of relying on the perceptions of others to inform our senses.