Mad Horse Dark Horse Night Reading Of THE BREASTS OF TIRESIAS

Mad Horse Theatre Presents: Dark Horse Nights! This new series of staged readings will present works that provide additional insights and conversation to the main stage productions they align with.

The Breasts of Tiresias by Apollinaire, directed by company member Nick Schroeder will take place on two Wednesdays during the run of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance.

Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealist” for his play, The Breasts of Tiresias (1917). In the play, set in Africa, a Frenchwoman, Thérèse, decides to become a man, and her breasts float away like two balloons; she is renamed Tiresias and becomes a general and a member of parliament. Between the first and second acts, her abandoned husband gives birth to over 40,000 children, all in one afternoon. 
Like many other playwrights of the mid - late 2000s, Albee always has some surreal elements in his plays.

The reading includes director company member Nick Schroeder and guest artists: Matthew Butcher, Rachel Gallagher, James Patefield, JJ Peeler and Maiya Koloski.

The readings will be held on Wednesday  1/22 and 1/29 at 7:30.  Tickets are PWYD.  No charge reservations are recommended but not necessary. Please note: The Dark Horse Night reading of The Breasts of Tiresias  is a separate reservation from the mainstream production.
 
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Thoughts from the Director Nick Schroeder: In the 1963 short story "Shower of Gold" by American fiction writer Donald Barthelme, one character arguing with another tells them that "you may not be interested in absurdity, but absurdity is interested in you." 

I read this story as a sulky, contrarian teenager in the late 1990s. It feels odd to square that teenage feeling with what now seems like an eerily calm period of American cultural and political life, between the Iraq War and before 9/11. For me at the time, slinking off into the absurdity of postmodern and surrealist literature was an exotic exercise, and a way of obfuscating the path of maturity that seemed inevitably to lead to an adulthood defined by tedious, cubicle-bound professionalism. Even stripped of Barthelme's story's context, it just felt like a good and vaguely rebellious line.

And I've never forgotten it. Over time, however, I began to see absurdist art and literature as boring, even obnoxious. The showy, attention-seeking gestures of artists more interested in marketing their own inaccessible genius than responding to their world. It didn't help that the internet, with its way of elevating wacky or shocking content above the rest, seemed to reward these gestures and make them novel viral sensations. I wasn't interested.

Both positions seem outdated to me today. In the preface to the premiere of Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésias) in June of 1917, during the First World War, French poet, playwright and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term surrealism, writing that "When man wanted to imitate walking, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He thus made surrealism without being aware of it." At its core, what we have come to call absurdity in art and literature was a tool for constructing a kind of makeshift vehicle to carry ideas and sentiments on terrain where vehicles could not otherwise travel. It seems like no coincidence that the famously remounted production of The Breasts of Tiresias, adapted as an opéra bouffe by Francis Jean Michel Poulenc in the 1940s, also came during a period of terrible war. 

Without putting too fine a point on it, I think absurdity may be interested in us again. The Breasts of Tirésias is a surrealist play with a nearly incoherent plot of themes, references, and commentaries: on women's emancipation, opposing war, the liberation of traditional gender roles, the falling birth rate, Greek myth, the erotic imagination, etc., all mixed with a few send-ups of the police (Apollinaire was falsely arrested and accused of stealing the Mona Lisa; he wasn't a fan). 

Apollinaire wasn't political in a conventional sense, and the play doesn't neatly translate to our era. But in their absurdity, both are committed to an ecstatic, visionary enthusiasm for life, and a language for re-imagining what's possible. We could use some of that for whatever we build next. 

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