In this is the end of sleeping
Based on Chekhov's unfinished
work known best as Platonov but also known as Fatherlessness,
In This Is The End Of Sleeping is directed by Jay Scheib. The sweat
pours like rain and no one will ever be the same when the laughing and drinking
and running through the woods gives way to bathing and kissing and shooting
guns...
Sound
and Video design by Leah Gelpe, Stage and Lighting
design by Jeremy Morris, Costume design by Jessica
Hinel , Art Direction / Objects by Bara Jichova
Kirkpatrick, Stage Managed by Belina Mizrahi,
Assistant director Adam Perlman
Produced through a special collaboration with Massachussets Institute of Technology,
Rotor Productions, and The Chekhov Now Festival.
Directed by Jay Scheib
with
performances by Emily Knapp, Joan Jubett,* Eric Dean
Scott,* Olga Fedorishcheva, Dan Liston, Jay Scheib, Vanessa Burke, Gaetan
Bonhomme, Caleb, Eliza Bent, Tao Wang, and John Dewis
PERFOMANCES AS PART OF THE CHEKHOV NOW FESTIVAL IN NEW YORK CITY
Performance
Schedule: Friday, November 12 at 8pm; Saturday, November
13 at 8pm; Sunday, November 14 at 2pm; Wednesday, November 17 at 8pm; Thursday,
November 18 at 8pm; Saturday, November 20 at 5pm
At the Connelly Theatre, 220 East
4th Street, New York, NY 10009
Tickets: 212-352-3101
or www.theatremania.com
Short statement:
The early works of major writers attract me because they lack restraint in
their daring endeavor to possess life. I admire this obsessive/obscene attempt
to contain the world with a play. This is an effort to write life itself,
to coerce life itself into playing out its own folly, its own rich and desperate
attempts at glory or happiness—This is life playing out its pitiful
violence, its maddening disillusionment, its tidal march toward social obsolescence—this
is Chekhov’s first play. A masterpiece of unruliness and one of the
great mysteries of Russian literature. Discovered posthumously sometime around
1920 in a safe deposit box. Its title page was missing. This play is Untitled.
One well-documented theory recognizes the play as the Fatherlessness text
that Chekhov names in a letter to his brother. A play he is known to have
destroyed.
I title the performance and not the text. The text remains unnamed—though
I think that Fatherlessness is both appropriate and fitting of Chekhov’s
young intellect. The performance that I am making is titled In this is the
End of Sleeping.
In this is the End of Sleeping is a suicide by eating matches all the night
long. It is a live performance for three-channel video installation, real-time
audio processing and Russian steam bath. In this is the End of Sleeping is
also an attempt to make life appear as itself. Life emerging at its unpredictable
end. It is the longest day of the year and it is a hot hot sleeplessness here—the
sweat pours like rain and the water is icey cold. But when the laughing and
drinking and running through the woods gives way to kissing and bathing and
shooting guns… no one will survive unchanged.
This is the age of cynicism, it is the time of Chekhov and his Platonov. It
is the end of an era. This play is about loving each other, and buying each
other out.
This is my second statement on the play
Jay Scheib, Summer 2004
About
the director
Biographie
Born in Shendadoah Iowa 1969, Ab Summa Cum Laude University
of Minnesota and MFA Columbia University School of the Arts.
Jay Scheib,
Director
Recent projects for the theatre include a multimedia adaptation of Tolstoy’s
Naturalistic classic The Power of Darkness with Pont Mühely
in Budapest and the New York Premier of Kevin Oakes’, The Vomit
Talk of Ghosts at the Flea Theater. Other recent works include Alfred
de Musset’s Lorenzaccio with the student ensemble from Harvard
University at the Loeb Drama Center; the New York City premier of a new translation
of West Pier (quai ouest) by Bernard-Marie Koltès as part
of the KOLTES NY 2003 Festival in NY; MargarethHamlet, a choregraphic
evening for solo performer with guitar at Schwedterstr 12, Berlin; an original
adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy: ORESTEIA AMERICA AMERICA, dreamlife
of thousandaire affluence, commissioned by the Exiles Festival in Berlin;
two plays by Lothar Trolle Fernsehen and Vormittag in der Freiheit
at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (3. stock), Berlin in collaboration
with BAT. Other international credits include: Glass/Mohn after texts
by Tennessee Williams, Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin produced by Pont Mühely
in Budapest; a studio workshop of Antonioni’s film Red Desert with
Krétákor Szinhaz, Budapest; The War Plays by Edward
Bond, In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès,
and a studio production titled Bartleby, Wallstreet: NEBRASKA after
texts by Herman Melville, and the music of Bruce Springsteen at the Mozarteum,
Salzburg Austria. New York credits include Falling and Waving, a digital
opera composed by David Lang, with libretto by Ron Jones, co-produced
by Brooklyn Academy of Music and Arts at St Ann’s in Brooklyn; Herakles
after Euripides and Heiner Müller, at Chashama, The Power of the
Dog by Howard Barker, Othello, and Mistressjulie, after
texts by Strindberg.
As a writer, Scheib recently collaborated with director Robert Woodruff in
the writing of an adaptation of Jean-Luc Godard’s oeuvre titled: Godard
(distant and right) which premiered at the Ohio Theatre, produced by
Columbia University School of the Arts. The production went on to win both
the peer and professional jury prizes at the Festival des Jeunes at Theatre
Nanterre des Amandiers, Paris.
Winner of the Richard Sherwood Award from the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson
Theatre, L.A.. Scheib holds an A.B. summa cum laude in theatre arts from the
University of Minnesota, an MFA in theatre directing from Columbia University,
and is an alumnus of the SoHo Rep writer/director Lab in NY. Scheib is currently
assitant professor of theatre at MIT in Cambridge MA, and a regular guest
professor at the Universität Mozarteum, Institute für Schauspiel
und Regie in Salzburg, Austria.
other
Upcoming projects
In the winter Scheib will direct The Medea after Heiner Müller
and Euripides at La Mama in New York with the International theatre of actors
—ITO-NY.
