Philadelphia Fringe Favorite Thaddeus Phillips Travels The World In ZOO MUNDO

Theater 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 humanity & coffee titled Zoo Mundo.

This live online performance continues through February 13. Press is invited to shows January 20-23 or after. Shows run Thursday-Sunday at 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday (7 p.m. UK Time). In this new work, presented by The Miami Light Project, three different people, with three different stories, take audiences along the path along the route out of East Africa that follows the first humans and the first coffee beans. Zoo Mundo theatrically visits in Addis Ababa, Venice, Moscow, the Siberian Express, across the Bering Straight and down the Pacific coast ending in Antartica.

All this is performed by Phillips live and over the world wide web, in and around miniature and surreal sets created 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. Tickets cost $33 and are available at www.zoomundo.org.

Tatiana Mallarino is co-directing and the dramaturg for ZOO MUNDO while Steve Cuiffo, fresh off working on "Dana H" on Broadway and creating magic for the new season of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", 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 only 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). "Zoo Motel" became the longest running live online theater play. Romanian theater writer & scholar, OCTAVIAN SAIU of the International Association of Theatre Critics wrote: "In the most improbable and extraordinary way, "Zoo Motel" is real, genuine theatre: although it defies all the classical definitions of this art form, it succeeds in affirming its essence"

Zoo Mundo takes the experiments made in "Zoo Motel" to the next level; 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 and technically impossible storylines for Zoo Mundo and will be performing the work as one continuous shot to create a unique, fun and 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, and triumphs".

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

Tickets and more information available at www.zoomundo.org

To post a comment, you must register and login.