MadLab Theatre Opens MEMORY FRAGMENTS Tonight

The World premiere of Sam Wallin's futuristic murder mystery about Detective Cloud sifting through others memories, including his own, to solve a murder in a corporate virtual world where nothing is ever as it appears, MEMORY FRAGMENTS will run 8 p.m., tonight October 16, Friday October 17, and Saturday October 18, Friday October 24 and Saturday October 25, Friday October 31 and Saturday November 1 at the MadLab Theatre, 227 N. 3rd St. For tickets and more information, call 614-221-5418, or visit www.madlab.net. Tickets: $12, $10 for students and senior citizens, $8 for MadLab members.

In MEMORY FRAGMENTS: In the future, your memories will be recorded in 3D, for playback and interaction at your leisure. Until you're murdered, of course - then your memories will become key pieces of evidence in the investigation into your death. What was the last thing you remember? Did you get a good look at your killer? Is the clue to solve your murder hiding in a tender moment with your lover? In Memory Fragments, Detective Cloud navigates this all-too-plausible vision of the future as he examines the shattered and decaying memories of a young man brutally murdered.

At their smaller, former space, MadLab often utilized just about every square inch of space during a production with the backstage area often quite crowded and compressed. It made for an intimate experience on stage and backstage. Their current location affords them a bit more room including their workshop, which doubles as a relatively spacious offstage area, dressing room, and green room.

However, with their latest production, Memory Fragments, they will be returning to those days of maxing out space. Memory Fragments involves a detective in the future trying to track down a killer by watching the titular memory fragments which are recorded and displayed by a computer.

MadLab will use projectors to display these fragments to the audience, but they'll still be performed live. What? The plan is to construct sets in the aforementioned workshop where these memory fragments will take place.

Andy Batt, director, explains: "When I first read the script, I fell in love with the sci-fi nature of it. I grew up watching sci-fi shows and reading sci-fi books. I've always been a geek at heart. Though the script was written originally to be performed entirely live and 3D (the way normal theatre is done), I thought it would be cool to do something with projections and give a futuristic multi-media feel to the show. I've worked with multi-media scenes in live theatre before and I've always found them lacking. There's a dip in energy as the live performance dies away and you transition to recorded media. I wanted to find a way to keep that energy, as well as keep the cue pickup sharp and fast. To that end, I wanted to experiment with doing live, projected video in the show. To my knowledge, no one has ever done anything like this in Columbus, at least not to this scale."

CAST:

Cloud - Jim Azelvandre

Mordecai - Travis Horseman

Jerome - Andy Woodmansee

Charlotte - Colleen Dunne

Meryl - Katharine Pilcher

Brown/D'Angelo - Stephen Woosley

Anna/Delia/Jenny - Julia Ferreri

Male Psych./Male Harvey Peel/Potok - Andy Batt

Wilma/Female Harvey Peel - MaryBeth Griffith

Female Psych./Nan Ghent - Laura Spires

About the Playwright - Sam Wallin has been writing plays for over twenty years now, and has had many of his short plays produced in theatres and festivals around the United States. He currently lives in Washington State, where he is a librarian, husband, father, and collector of various odds and ends that clutter up his house. One of these days, he'll take all those skeleton keys and make a really cool shadow box thing, or get one of those coffee tables with a glass top and a display drawer, and then everyone can enjoy his collection. Same with the stamps, rocks, coins, and rotary-dial telephones. Well, the phones won't fit in a shadow box, so maybe he'll put up some shelves that will display them all. Although to be fair, it won't look really cool until he has at least ten phones, so he'll probably need to get a few more before he builds the shelf. Also, the garage needs to be cleaned out. That needs to happen first.

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