/VANITAS/ Zachary Small

About This Show

VANITAS is the emotional vacancy of repeatable, predictable forms; it is the emptied, utilitarian expectation you feel looking at a modern city’s horizon, the power of architecture quietly choreographing our lives.

We want to destroy VANITAS.

Like witnessing the demolition of a building, the rupturing of VANITAS produces a surge of emotions: adrenaline, panic, anger, and most importantly, absurdity.

Through a combination of theatricality, poetics, and technology VANITAS shows how stories we attach to technology influence how it evolves, and reciprocally, how we evolve around it. However immaterial stories are, they have the power to buckle concrete and bend steel, and they can be difficult to escape.

About the Artists

Zachary Small is a New York-based genderqueer theatremaker. Most recently he dramaturged Mabou Mines’s Imagining the Imaginary Invalid which premiered at La MaMa ETC (NYTimes Critics’ Pick). He is also a contributing arts writer for Hyperallergic, Hopes&Fears, and BOMB Magazine among others where he focuses on overlapping themes of technology, queerness, and the arts. Previously, he has performed as Jack Pickford in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic (Off-Broadway) and as Mephistopheles in Faust 2.0 (Mabou Mines). Graduate of Columbia University (Art History and Political Science).

Naomi Boyce is a New York-based theatremaker. She has directed and dramaturged at the English Theatre Berlin, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre and at Eugene Lang College. She has assistant directed under Sharon Fogarty (Mabou Mines) and the Brooklyn-based company Polybe + Seats. Upcoming directing work includes The Golden Calf at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. In 2015 she participated in the International Summer Program at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center and was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin. 2014 graduate of Barnard College (Theatre Directing).

Chet King is a New York based artist, designer, and musician. He’s worked for the Wooster Group’s Summer Institute in various capacities, and been involved in a few projects with Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players.  He just graduated from Columbia with a major in theatre arts and a concentration in sociocultural anthropology.  He directed Oedipus Rex for his thesis this past April.  His debut EP is forthcoming in 2017.

Josiah Grimm is a New York-based theater professional and producer. He is a graduate of Louisiana State University and has spent the last few years working on the administrative staffs at Manhattan Theatre Club and The Public Theater. Most recently, he was a part of the producing team for Jeremy Kamp’s Gutting, which premiered at the National Black Theatre in Harlem.

 

Thursday, November 3 at 7:30pm

General Admission
$15 in advance
$18 at the door

Students / Seniors / ID NYC
$12

Estimated Runtime
60 minutes

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Credits

Written by Zachary Small

Directed by Naomi Boyce

Sound/Video/Set Design by Chet King

Drawings and Graphic Design by Inga Aleknaviciute

Produced by Josiah Grimm

Featuring Gabby Beans, Theo Maltz, and Shannon Elizabeth O’Brien