Alan Smithee Directed This Play at BAM Harvey Theater

Astronauts, Bolsheviks, and middle-American families mingle on a stage littered with lawn chairs, telephones, fur coats, and pistols in this collision of early-20th-century Moscow, midcentury Paris, and late-20th-century Houston. Big Dance Theater directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar sample fragments of iconic film scripts and novels, divorced from their narrative contexts, to create a kinetic collage of political rhetoric, pathos, paranoia, and suburban love. With a titular nod to the Hollywood pseudonym[1] for directors who disavow their work after creative interference, Alan Smithee Directed This Play contemplates the slippery nature of creative control, history, its fictions, and the inextricable link between the personal and the historical.