Monday, October 3, 2016 / 7 PM

Part of the 2016 Writers Block staged reading and performance festival

Featuring:
Louis Cancelmi
Dawn Akemi Saito
Black-Eyed Susan
Alenka Kraigher
Everett Quinton

FAUST/How I Rose takes on a host of cultural, social, and personal politics. A high-flying diplomat, Jesurun’s Faust is susceptible to love and its inevitable pain, a vulnerability exploited by his often-sympathetic, female Mephistopheles. Bedeviled by a kind of 360-degree vision, she sees everything from every point of view, simultaneously, and is the atmospheric center of the play. This story of Faust is set in modern secular times. Secular time infers that neither God nor the Devil exist, and the piece explores Faust’s own responsibility and motivation for his work and life.

The play itself has a particular worldview: the messiness of contemporary life. Its given setting is simultaneously before, during and after our present time. It implies a precarious international panorama of eternally shifting layers of history, time and expectations.

FAUST/How I Rose was originally commissioned by The Builders Association and Theater Neumarkt in Zurich in 1996 and performed in Europe and the U.S. as Jump Cut (Faust). In 1998, it was directed by acclaimed Mexican director Martín Acosta at the National Theatre of Mexico where it ran for several months in sold out performances. After a series of other Mexican runs, it was performed at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico and BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2004. Jesurun also directed a German version of the play in Frankfurt in 1999. About John Jesurun

TICKETS: $20 Suggested Donation
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If Jung described modern humanity as “in search of a soul,” Jesurun’s games with language, time, and narrative, you might say, are being played over the void where that invisible object used to reside. In a world where dogged materialism and literal-mindedness seem to rule, he offers an escape hatch that comes without obligations to technology, machinery, or the ostensibly solid realities that, as political life has recently been teaching us, can vanish overnight if someone’s in a mood to throw his power around. By the time Faust/How I Rose comes along, we’ll know if we’re in for four more years of devil’s deals or not; either way, our souls are likely to need the liberating lunacy of his verbal dance.
–Michael Feingold on Faust/How I Rose, Village Voice, 2004

Jesurun’s updated version of the Faust legend traveled from earth (an apocalyptic war zone) to hell (a physician’s waiting room) and back again, with many other stops in between. More than ten separate locations were visited in the course of the drama, ranging from a psychedelic porno theatre to a virtual golfing range….Textually, Jesurun approached Faust’s pact with the devil from the point of view of  Mephistopheles, depicted here as a loudmouthed punk-rock/surfer girl. Faust, in contrast, assumed the demeanor of a well-healed diplomat, a master of political argumentation, rationalization and verbal foreplay….
Gone is the pretense of magic, cohesion and linearity on stage; replaced by material excess, incongruence and multisequentiality. Combining a sculptor’s eye for beauty with a reality TV producer’s lust for schlock, Jesurun’s performance works interweave high art aestheticism with lowbrow tabloidism.
-Kathryn Farley, Theatre Journal

John Jesurun-playwright/director/media artist. Since 1982: text,direction,design for over 30 pieces including: the 61 episode CHANG IN A VOID MOON, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE,SNOW and the media trilogy: DEEP SLEEP/WHITE WATER/BLACK MARIA.

Fellowships  include NEA, MacArthur, Rockefeller,Guggenheim, Asian Cultural Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Published by TCG, PAJ, NoPassport Press. “Shatterhand Massacree and other Media Texts”/ Performing Arts Journal.  Past projects include FAUST~HOW I ROSE/ BAM, PHILOKTETES/Soho Rep. “Philoktetes”/Kyoto Performing Arts Center with Hideo Kanze, FIREFALL/DTW, STOPPED BRIDGE OF DREAMS/La Mama, Jeff Buckley video “Last Goodbye”, Harry Partch’s opera “Delusion of the Fury”/Japan Society. Teaching: Justus Liebig University/Giessen,Goethe University,Frankfurt,DASARTS Amsterdam, NYU,Tokyo University,Kyoto University of Art+ Design,Bard College,Carnegie Mellon. His webserial SHADOWLAND can be seen on Vimeo. Future projects include new episodes of SHADOWLAND and CHANG IN A VOID MOON, a collaborations with Juliette Mapp and Japanese playwright/director Takeshi Kawamura and a production of PHILOKTETES by Teatro LOT in Lima, Peru.

The staged readings series is a benefit for the Actors Fund’s Howl! HELP, providing emergency financial assistance and social service support to artists who have made or continue to make their careers in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side arts communities. Howl! HELP is administered by the Actors Fund and 100% ticket sales benefit the Actors Fund.