Little Theatre at Dixon Place

NOW I TASTE BLOOD?!

written by Bailey Williams
directed by Sarah Blush
sound design by John Gasper

A beautiful and exclusive golf course, as far as the eye can see. Weird pools of toxic green slime.

The historic Sherbert Theatre. And of course, the local watering hole. One cup of bad gin, please.



TERMINAL HIP

written by Mac Wellman
performed by Steve Mellor

You don’t not have no super shoes when as how
you don’t need not to never.
Ask for the labernath it’s all over sure.
They got music there so bad.
They got music there as do the
shame-ball double-up and fall-over
three times running while it drills
corrosive z’s on that there river bottom . . . .
Anyone can understand this, right?



CALIFORNIA

written + directed by Trish Harnetiaux
with Milo Cramer, MIke Iveson and Keilly McQuail

An anticipated family road trip takes an unexpected turn.
An excerpt of a new play based on the memory of a true story.



This month, Little Theatre is breaking from its usual format to present a longer piece—an encore performance by Steve Mellor of Mac Wellman’s Terminal Hip—along with shorter excerpts of new plays by Bailey Williams and Trish Harnetiaux.

First shown in 1990, Steve’s remarkable performance of Mac’s remarkable text remains foundational for anyone interested in seeing how far the radical deconstruction of language can be pushed. This was long the grail of some of theatre’s boldest knights errant–Stein, Tzara, Kharms, Wilson, Foreman, et al., all come to mind. All in search of a miraculous treasure—an alchemy that could transform nonsense into the most exalted sense—which was never to be found, of course. The idea was patently absurd: everyone knew listening to nonsense was painful.

Or so it seemed until Terminal Hip.

Initial reviews praised the work with the blend of giddy befuddlement typical of the time: “A post-Joycean Jabberwocky,” wrote a certain mellow Timesman. “Expect no exegesis. Just sit back and enjoy the torrent of language, as Mr. Wellman zigzags through time, space and participle.”

The painter Linda Yablonsky, writing in BOMB Magazine, was made of sterner stuff: “His is a world of phantasm, environmental decay, bigotry, evil, longing. In a Wellman play, the end of the world seems just around the corner but then it turns out the corner is not all that close—it may even be behind us, an even scarier proposition. The point is simply that all is not lost. In such plays as Terminal Hip … he has determined to unmask the illusions that undermine the value of experience with a showman’s love of artifice and an absurdist’s sense of dread. For Wellman, patriotism is a love of American speech, which he offers in all its deeply disturbed and poetic glory.”

In a blurb for the recent Wellman Symposium at the Flea, critic Helen Shaw called Steve Mellor “Wellman’s truest muse and avatar,” and described Terminal Hip as, “a pure language monologue that shouldn’t work—it’s just a torrent of nonsense—but is somehow excruciatingly funny.” Scott Shepard might have summed it up best when he said to Steve, “It sort of makes complete sense”

Steve Mellor’s Terminal Hip is more than just virtuoso performance. It is essential viewing.