Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines

Rainpan 43

HERE Arts Center, NYC, 2009

 

 

Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines is a clown-theatre piece that explores the performance of machines and our propensity to build them. Deeply fascinated by the drawings of Rube Goldberg, we pursued an unexpected premise, “the most amount of effort for the least amount of gain.” Perhaps the world’s last survivors, three men endlessly build machines to give meaning to their existence. Their daily rituals include elaborately disastrous breakfasts, surveillance drills, and telephone conversations with God. In the end, they are consumed by the rising of global warming’s cacophonous seas.

 

The opening scene of the play centers on an “alarm clock” machine that automatically turns on all the lights that have been installed into the set. Rolling billiard balls, tin-can gondolas, model ships, and boxing gloves are but a few of the mechanisms that activate switches and dimmers until, at the end of the sequence, the room is fully lit. As the play drifts further into solitary and absurdist paranoia, a more fantastical lighting world emerges. Suddenly there are trenches, helicopters, a war room, and an intrusion of theatrics that catapult the trio into an imaginary battle that ends as mysteriously as it began.

 

 

 

Conceived by: Quinn Bauriedel, Geoff Sobelle, and Trey Lyford

Directed by: Aleksandra Wolska

Sound Design by: James Sugg and Sean Mattio

Scenic Design by: Hiroshi Iwasaki, Steven Dufala, and

Billy Blaise Dufala

Lighting Design by: James Clotfelter