Theater in Quarantine Premieres Scott R. Sheppard's BLOOD MEAL

Theater in Quarantine, a pandemic performance laboratory from writer, director, and performer Joshua William Gelb and choreographer Katie Rose McLaughlin, will present the world premiere of Blood Meal, a new play written by Obie Award-winner Scott R. Sheppard (Underground Railroad Game, The Appointment). In this satirical thriller, remote performers Gelb and Lee Minora come together from separate closets across the East Village to build a portrait of intimacy and infestation. Set to premiere on February 1 on YouTube, this 35-minute work features direction by Gelb along with movement direction and costumes by McLaughlin.

In Blood Meal, the lovely home of a young couple is overtaken by blood-sucking insects. While terrifying, the true horrors of this infestation are the paranoid nightmares lurking beneath the couple's façade.

The additional creative team for Blood Meal includes Stivo Arnoczy (video design), Kate Marvin (sound design), Brian Bose (social media), and Morgan Lindsey Tachco (creative producer).

Live streamed performances of Blood Meal will take place on Monday, February 1 at 7pm and 9pm on Theater in Quarantine's YouTube page. Following the live broadcast, the on-demand recording of Blood Meal will be available at www.youtube.com/joshuawilliamgelb, along with the complete Theater in Quarantine archive, in perpetuity.

Blood Meal is made possible in part by Theater Mitu's Artists-at-Home Program. Theater in Quarantine's work is generously supported by a Creative Residency with La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, as participants in LaMaMa and CultureHub's Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, and by many individual donors.

About Theater in Quarantine

Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic closed all theaters, Joshua William Gelb transformed a 2' x 4' x 8' closet inside his East Village apartment into a white-box theater. Starting on March 30, Gelb and his collaborators began releasing pre-recorded studies in movement, clown, camera orientation, and perspective - building towards more complex theatrical experiences. On April 23, they premiered Theater in Quarantine's first live-stream performance: an adaptation of Kafka's The Neighbor which was followed by an unauthorized edit of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and collaborations with artists like Scott R. Sheppard (Underground Railroad Game), Nehemiah Luckett (Jazz Singer), and Ellen Winter (36 Questions).

Theater in Quarantine's recent productions, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy and Footnote for the End of Time, were met with critical acclaim. Jesse Green in his New York Times critic's pick review declared that Theater in Quarantine has produced "some of the New Medium's most imaginative work from some of its simplest materials." Helen Shaw in Vulture wrote that Theater in Quarantine "makes confinement a virtue, a prompt to imagination." Maya Phillips in The New York Times noted, "These small-scale, digitally savvy productions have matched the texts in their idiosyncratic approaches." Recently, CultureHub and La MaMa presented Mute Swan written by Pulitzer-prize finalist Madeleine George for Theater in Quarantine.

Please visit joshuawilliamgelb.com for more information and youtube.com/joshuawilliamgelb to stream all of the Theater in Quarantine original works.

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