Boulder-based square product theatre presents the World Premiere of "Everything was Stolen. ," a new work originally developed and workshopped in London, UK by Emily K. Harrison, square product theatre producing artistic director. The piece marks the first original, full-length work developed by the company since 2016's "This Aunt is Not a Cockroach."
"Everything was Stolen ." is a piece created from a variety of stolen and original (but mostly stolen) texts, songs, video, images and ephemera in an evocation of America. The piece, created by Emily K. Harrison as part of American playwright Charles Mee's (re)making project, is inspired in part by the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi and in part by something American composer John Cage once said: "And so it is out of this chaos, this accumulation of history and novelty, that we begin building."
"We're very excited to back in the studio developing new work, especially work that's much less plot driven than most of what Colorado audiences have the chance to see," says Harrison. "The narrative structure for the piece is very loose - it's more a collection of vignettes, songs, and images that explore American history and American life in a way that's a little different. We're having a lot of fun in rehearsal experimenting with different ways to tell these stories, to disrupt and deconstruct a nostalgic view of what our country is, of what it means to be 'American.'"
"Largely, 'Everything was Stolen .' explores America as an idea, or an experiment, and while many experiments succeed, far more of them fail," Harrison says. "The piece is evocative of a vision of America that arguably only ever existed on the surface. The show uses recycled imagery and text that we're working to deconstruct and disrupt in fun and unexpected ways in order to reveal and celebrate the reality that nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent, and nothing is complete. The record skips, the video glitches, the house burns down - we lose something maybe we never really had. We rebuild, we start over again, and in doing so we forget parts of our history because it's inconvenient or painful. In that respect, I think the piece has the potential to speak to what the United States truly is, and the potential for what it could be."
Tickets available at https://everythingwasstolen.bpt.me or 800-838-3006
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