THE CONCRETES in New York
MONDAY Theatre @ Green Hours Bucharest
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
EAST RIVER COMMEDIA
PRESENT
THE CONCRETES
(after Vladimir Sorokin)
AS PART OF
the 4th annual
undergroundzero festival
(JULY 6-25 @ PERFORMANCE SPACE 122)
The Concretes are coming to New York!
July 14 & 16 @ 9:30pm
July 15 @ 7:30pm,
July 17 & 18 @ 5:30pm
Festival Press Contact: Emily Owens PR | Această adresă de e-mail este protejată de spamboţi; aveţi nevoie de activarea JavaScript-ului pentru a o vizualiza | 972.743.3746
THE PLAY
In the youngster’s night out, in a frenzy world full of easy amusements of a futuristic Moscow, long after the myth of the surgical strike disappeared, our characters decide to tear apart universal pieces of literature, to go inside other worlds and to search for new prey. Trip after trip, from Moby Dick to Natasha of War and Peace or the heroes of Dune, three – too real [aka concretes] - teenagers chew with orgasmic pleasure the symbols of world literary heritage then leaving with satisfaction towards something new.
Widely applauded in Romania, in various locations in Bucharest and in other theatres in the country, the performance engages young and more experienced theatre goers with a unique wit, the new language of the east, the raw screams of degenerated humans and to compensate: visual pleasures in a special offer by VJ Cinty.
You’d better come see The Concretes, who knows where they will be next, maybe just in the novel you read!
THE CAST
With: KATIA PASCARIU, MONICA SANDULESCU and MARIUS DAMIAN. Live-Vjing: CINTY. Costumes: CARMEN SECAREANU. Directed by ALEXANDRU MIHAESCU. Produced at MONDAY Theatre @ Green Hours (Bucarest, Romania)
WHERE AND WHEN
THE CONCRETES will play July 14 & 16 @ 9:30pm, July 15 @ 7:30pm, July 17 & 18 @ 5:30pm as part of the 4th Annual undergroundzero festival at Performance Space 122 (150 1st Avenue at 9th Street). Tickets ($20) may be purchased online at www.PS122.org or via phone at (212) 352-3101.
THE PLAYWRIGHT
Vladimir Sorokin’s development as a writer took place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. Sorokin's works, bright and striking examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian literary miscellanies and magazines. In 1992, Russian publishing house Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov (Collected Stories) – Sorokin’s first book to be nominated for a Russian Booker Award. In September 2001,Vladimir Sorokin received the National Booker Award; two months later, he was presented with the Award of Andrey Beliy for for outstanding contributions to Russian literature.
THE DIRECTOR
Alexandru Mihaescu started out as an actor after he graduated in 2003 from the Rostock Acting University in Germany. He followed different employments in theatre and film in Germany and Romania, while completing directing studies at the Bucharest University of Film and Theatre in 2006. In 2005, the Theatrical Union of Romania (UNITER) nominated him for the best emerging actor award. He then received a Robert Bosch scholarship in Cultural Management, which brought him back to Germany for one year working in theatres such as Theater an der Ruhr, Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf and Kampnagel in Hamburg where he co-produced the East-European Arts Festival Tr@nsfusion. From 2008 until the present he had several engagements, notably playing the main part in Radu Gabrea’s movie Red Gloves that premiered at the Transylvanian International Film Festival, the defense attorney in the Last Hour of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, a reenactment of the trial on stage, that successfully toured Germany and Switzerland and the production of the Pulse-Project at the Fabrica venue in Bucharest with the Chilean director Javier Opaza-Madariaga. He has been a long-time collaborator of the German Theatre in Timisoara where he staged David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union and Ravenhill’s Pool (no water). With the 2008 staging of Pool (no water) and his latest production The Concretes he participated at the National Theatre Festival Bucharest and the Arad Underground Festival in 2009. At present he is living as a freelance actor and director in Bucharest.
THE COMPANY
MONDAY Theatre @ Green Hours was founded in 1997 in the already famous jazz club Green Hours in Bucharest. It promotes young directors, actors and playwrights from Romania, being the first space dedicated to the independent theatre in this country. With more than 75 productions and coproductions in its 13 years of existence, MONDAY Theatre is present in the main Romanian festivals and often invited in other countries. It received the Excellence Award of UNITER (the equivalent of Tony Award in USA) and won important awards in foreign festivals (like Project-Fringe Award at Dublin Fringe Festival…). Its presence at the undergoundzero festival this year, is a return to NY after Fringe Festival in 2007 with The Sunshine Play and Bucharest Calling, written by Peca Stefan and directed by Ana Margineanu.
PRESS REVIEWS
“At the MONDAY Theatre @ Green Hours director Alexandru Mihaescu stages “The Concretes” by
Vladimir Sorokin, a real multimedia trip in trendy “archives”, a place where characters and major literature works are mutilated until their limbs and inner organs are thrown out […] Mihaescu and his actors enter perfectly the anarchic-virtual story, transforming their mimics and corporality from one sequence to another […] into a performance centered on the explosion of physicality.The Concretes smoke their free time like an anarchic joint that connects them to a global net of destruction.”
(Mihaela Michailov, journalist and playwright)
“And because Green Hours is a place open to experiment, another young director with an inciting view as how today’s theatre should be like, staged the text called “The Concretes” after Vladimir Sorokin. […] Alex Mihaescu’s concretes look like they escaped a sci-fi movie or some manga animes. […] But will it take that long until the creations of fashion catwalks enter our homes and communication becomes a cipher made up by global terms and our own “little” languages or until we won’t be interested in books anymore unless we can enter the story ourselves? In this sense, the parable by Sorokin and dramatized by Alex Mihaescu shows us what we can become, without any moralizing intent […] More interesting than the text proposal is the style worked out by the director and his actors […] a sum of verbal habits and robotized movements transforming the three into real specimens of a species other than human.”
(Cristina Modreanu, journalist, manager of the National Theatre Festival in Romania).