ZOO MUNDO Announced at Buntport Theater

Buntport Theater present ZOO MUNDO, a new theater work performed live over the World Wide Web by Thaddeus Phillips, running December 16, 2021 to January 2, 2022.

Theatre director, designer and performer Thaddeus Phillips (Zoo Motel, 17 Border Crossings, A Billion Nights on Earth, Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, Lost Soles) and artist Steven Dufala (HOME & The Object Lesson) transport viewers across the Earth entire with a live cinematic play about two things that have greatly altered planet earth: humanity & coffee.

Tracing the path along the route out of East Africa and the bones of Lucy (and the first coffee beans), Zoo Mundo weaves three stories that follow a line across Buckminister Fuller's Dymaxian map of Earth with stops in Marrakesh, Venice, Tbilisi, on the Siberian Express to Pyongyang, across the Bering Straight and down the Pacific coast ending in Antartica. All this is performed by Phillips in and around miniature and surreal sets created specifically for live performance by Obie Award winning Artist and Designer, Steven Dufala. ZOO MUNDO is an exploration on what makes us human, where we have been and where we are going and is performed for only 25 screens nightly.

ZOO MUNDO has been created with strong inspiration from the BBC series "Full Circle" hosted by Michael Palin, Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", and the films of Jaques Tati, Michel Gondry, David Lean and Jim Jarmouch and is, for all intensive purposes, a 'Round the world in 80 minutes' theatrical affair. Tatiana Mallarino is co-directing and the dramaturg for ZOO MUNDO while Steve Cuiffo, fresh off working on "Dana H" on Broadway and collaborating with David Blaine, will be devising magic and illusions.

In 2020, Director Thaddeus Phillips & Designer Steven Dufala created "Zoo Motel", which opened in September of 2020 for an initial run of 4 weeks, but was extended for an additional 36 weeks and presented by venues and theaters across the world from the Festival Otono in Madrid, The Carrefour de Theatre in Quebec, Theatre Nation in the UK and by theaters in Prague, Edinburgh, Santiago de Chile, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Toronto and Sibiu, Romania. It was translated into French & Spanish (in which Phillips performed) and is closing this coming November via ArtsEmerson's the World OnStage 2021 / 2022 season. "Zoo Motel" was noted primarily for its ability to be a truly live theatrical work transmitted directly into people homes.

Phillips says, "Zoo Motel was about confinement but ZOO MUNDO is about exploration. With the first project, we touched on some ideas of what could be done making theater live yet via a camera and we wanted to create with absolutely no limits on where we could go cinematically or theatrically. Thus, we crafted the most ridiculously epic & technically impossible storylines for ZOO MUNDO, and will be performing the work as one continuous shot to create a unique, fun & harrowing theatrical event that can be seen from anywhere on earth. Thematically, we are at an absolutely crazy time on this planet, this work seeks to look at the zoo we have created for ourselves, and try to grapple with the huge questions we face, and try to understand how we, simply put, as a species are so intelligent and so stupid as the same time. ZOO MUNDO is a theatrical examination of this planet and all its oddities, curiosities, failures & triumphs."

ZOO MUNDO will feature sections that invoke spectator interaction through a surreal Jeopardy game show, various illusions, and magic. A Programme PDF will be sent to online audiences complete with printable artistic objects, created by Dufala, that accent and enhance the live work.

Once ZOO MUNDO opens via the world wide web, it will then be touring later in 2022 to physical theaters, making the performing of this live film part a performance in itself.

Tickets and more information available at www.zoomundo.org.

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