“If you’re going to pull a knife, USAlo” takes us to a visual plane where petroleum contaminated marine life frames the scenic horizon. Together with Samuel Beckett, the work reinvents the illusion of Ulysses’ mermaids and thrashes out issues of lost love between a petroleum platform worker and a Disneyworld character actress.
“If you’re going to pull a knife, USAlo” employs the texts of Samuel Beckett as a foundation for dramatic exchanges that touch on pessimism, hopelessness, and absurd sea life. This cutting-edge work mines these gloomy themes in search of something upbeat to cling to: a magic solvent that will clean the ocean, the prospect of the perfect job that pays you to do what you love, or a piece of floating plastic garbage large enough to float on without drowning.
This work will be performed simultaneously in both Spanish and English, in keeping with the spirit of Beckett who composed in French and English, and was able to move between two languages fluidly. Representing a linguistic reality of our community and local work lives, the story will play off tensions of opposites: The mythical figure of the mermaid, and the very real horror of the pollutions of our oceans; the irreversible destructiveness of plastic, and the possibility to reinvent yourself over and over again; the Tower of Babel-like confusion of fused and multiple languages, and the perfect recognition of ourselves in the whole of humanity.
The play is presented in collaboration with Miami Light Project and Miami-Dade County Auditorium, as part of FUNDarte’s Miami On Stage series.
Dates & Times
Thursday-Saturday, September 8-10, 2011 @ 8:00 PM
Sunday, September 11, 2011 @ 5:00 PM