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Sontag's Lost Play A Parsifal to Receive New York Premiere
By: BWW News Desk Dec. 29, 2005
Sontag, who died on December 27th, 2004, is considered to have been one of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century; she was also deeply interested in the theatre. Playwright/artistic director John Jankhe will direct A Parsifal, whose Hotel Savant will present the play. Jankhe, according to press notes, found the play at Housing Works Thrift Store in New York City, and secured permission from Sontag to stage it.
A Parsifal is based on avant-garde director Robert Wilson's 1991 production of the Wagner opera, which is set in the middle ages and concerns the knight known to English-speakers as Sir Percival. "In this poetic yet gritty deconstruction of the opera, Wagner's innocent knight is instead an Uzi-toting soldier wandering aimlessly through an anonymous landscape in search of arbitrary sex and violence. Jahnke crafts a phantasmagoric epic in which to pit the individual against the system and pose Sontag's unflinching questions of consequence, accountability and blame," state production notes. The playwright dedicated the play to Wilson.
Sontag, who published the play with Antaeus Press in 1991, wrote no more than 6 pages for A Parsifal. Stage directions begin "A landscape (the dark forest, the lake, the tears). Garden gnomes. A column of light."
Okwui Okpokwasili, Ridiculous Theatre Company star Black-Eyed Susan, Michael Balsley, Tanisha Thompson, Kathryn Gracey and Matthew Bondy will be featured in A Parsifal. The design team will featuring costume designer Pilar Limosner, set designer Michael Casselli and sound designer Kristin Worrall collaborating with Jankhe, who is known for abstract, myth-soaked plays such as Lola Montez in Bavaria and Shady Maids of Haiti.
Sontag was a writer, critic and novelist whose omnivorous appetite for high and pop culture informed her many writings on literature, philosophy, aesthetics, art, film and theatre. "Notes on Camp," "Against Interpretation" and "Illness as Metaphor" were among her influential essays. Sontag's only other published play, Alice in Bed, was a feminist, fantastical piece centering on Alice James, the sister of novelist Henry James; it received its first New York production in 2000. Sontag also staged a 1993 production of Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theatre in Sarajevo, which was being attacked by Serb armies at the time.
Tickets to A Parsifal are $15; call (212) 352-3101.
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