Theaterlab presents

ORPHEUS & EURYDICE BY THE TRIP

Theaterlab
357 West 36t St, 3rd Floor
NY NY

16-20 July 2015

Text and direction by Tom Dugdale

Performed by Joshua Brody, Miranda Dainard, Tom Dugdale, Paul Marino, Joey Odom, Jenni Putney

The Trip is a San Diego-based contemporary theater company founded and led by Joshua Kahan Brody and Tom Dugdale which strives for interdisciplinary, ensemble-driven theater that challenges traditional boundaries of narrative and space. That is what their press says.

What they really are is extraordinary! The Trip’s ORPHEUS & EURYDICE takes a classic myth and brings it wholly down to earth, finding new meaning and making it applicable to our current times. Using video, film, music and a deceptively casual, interactive method, the audience is pulled into the performance. That makes it sound busy, but it is not. It is done so simply, so cleanly, it doesn’t even really feel like a performance. It feels completely natural to be experiencing what is actually kind of strange.

The walk out of the underworld is told simultaneously by a film projected on the back wall and by the actors sitting in front of the film. Jenni Putney and Tom Dugdale are exquisitely touching without being precious. Having the ending be a quiet end of a relationship rather than a Tragic End to an Epic makes so much sense, that it is a revelation.

I hope The Trip makes more trips to NYC. I can’t wait to see what they do next!

- Jean Tait -