On Friday, June 19th and Saturday, June 20th, 2009 I performed excerpts from Bride of Wildenstein – The Musical at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT.
In Bride of Wildenstein – The Musical, an aging socialite grows fur and claws to recapture her philandering game hunter husband’s attention. Using puppets and masks to augment the body, this solo cabaret performance playfully unpacks desire and the contagion of identity with songs that examine the making of a monstrosity.
The weird and tragic love story wildly reimagines tabloid accounts of the real-life “cat woman”, Jocelyn Wildenstein. As the protagonist’s marriage dissolves, she begins to reinvent herself through drastic measures. But biomedical and surgical procedures to become more feline only heighten her sense of estrangement and embolden her quest to find a fiercer sense of self.
PERFORMANCES
Friday, June 19th, 2009
For the Friday viewing, I performed Stuffed and Mounted, and Cash the Check in the Dina Merrill Theatre.
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
For the Saturday viewing, I performed Stuffed and Mounted, Cash the Check, and Pump that Pussy at Blue Gene’s Pub.
In Stuffed and Mounted, I played the protagonist, Jocelyn Wildenstein on my front side, and her philandering game hunter husband, Alec on the back.
In Cash The Check, Jocelyn’s pet monkey, May Moon, sings a cheerful song about retail therapy after Jocelyn has walked in on Alec (an adult baby) getting his diapers changed by another woman.
In Pump that Pussy, Jocelyn Wildenstein, finds herself amidst an illegal junk yard pumping party, after being estranged from her husband. She encounters a rat doctor with a caulking gun he uses to inject partiers with non-medical grade silicone, a worried pigeon recovering from a beak job, and a cockroach who has gotten his thorax pumped.
The performances were part of the National Puppetry Conference where I was an emerging artist that year. In this iteration, music was composed by Josh Senick with costumes by Rachel Weir.
Also featured in the program were fellow emerging and resident artists,
Zach Dorn
Spencer Lott
Jane Henson
Heather Henson
The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center is the country’s preeminent organization dedicated to the development of new works and new voices for the stage. Located in Waterford, Connecticut, it has launched some of the most important voices and works in American theater and has revolutionized the way new work is developed. The Center is home to The National Puppetry Conference, which encourages puppet artists to create through the visual and kinetic form of the puppet, to push beyond boundaries, and develop new works.
In 1990, Jane Henson established the Rose Endowment for Puppetry to support an annual puppetry conference – thus paying tribute to the Rose’s influential work – and to assure the continuing presence of puppetry at the O’Neill Center. George Latshaw was the Artistic Director for the conference’s inaugural year, followed by Richard Termine from 1992-2003, and Pam Arciero from 2003 to the present.
Bride of Wildenstein was developed at CalArts and the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center with funding from The Durfee Foundation and Ibex Puppetry.
