THE MECHANICAL Premieres At Bond Street 3/26-4/5

Bond Street Theatre returns to BTP with the world premier of The Mechanical. Parts Monty Python and The Twilight Zone, The Mechanical transplants the outcast creature from Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" into the true story of a sensational chess-playing robot built in the late 18th century. Known as The Turk, the chess-playing automaton amazed royalty, foreshadowed computers, and duped the public with its clever design. Incorporating the strong physical signatures that New York's Village Voice called "lyrical imagery of almost aching beauty," the production uses multi-media and the physical agility of the Bond Street Theatre ensemble to explore acts of creation, artistic intent, mystery, an age of revolution and the interconnections of science, art and religion.

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen, court science adviser to Austria-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa, created a mechanical man, fashioned from wood and powered by clockwork, with the ability to play chess with a human opponent. Luminaries such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe challenged the thinking machine and attempted to understand its closely guarded mechanics-which were in fact powered by an ingeniously secreted human player. Inventor and showman Johann Maelzel continued to tour the automaton until his death in 1838 aboard the steamship Otis, sailing out of Havana. We know this much is true.

Best known for their intercultural performances and tours, Bond Street Theatre has performed at BTP with Exile Theater of Afghanistan in Beyond the Mirror (2005), and with Theatre Tsvete of Bulgaria in Romeo and Juliet (City Paper's Best Play 2003).

But what if the captain of the Otis is the same captain who, twenty years earlier, rescued a half dead Victor Frankenstein from the Artic ice, where Mary Shelley begins her tale? And what if, via spectral machinations and the meddling of zanies, Frankenstein's creature is transported from the caves of Geneva to the palaces of Vienna and taken in by von Kempelen, to inhabit the secret cabinet of the automaton and use his man-made wits to beat his human opponents as a "thinking machine" ? Would the creature find joy and satisfaction in out-witting the best minds of the human society that previously rejected him, or rebel against the implied superiority of manufactured, mechanical life?
Cast: Brian Foley, Meghan Frank, Joanna Sherman, Kerry Watterson, Joshua Wynter, Anna Zastrow

Written and Directed by Michael McGuigan
Costumes by Carla Bellisio
Lighting by Jesse Belsky

THE MECHANICAL runs Thursday-Sat (8pm) and Sunday (2pm)
from March 26 - April 5

Tickets: $20 gen. / $15 senior, artist / $10 student
410 752 8558

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