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WALKER ART CENTER PRESENTS LEGENDARY
EXPERIMENTAL THEATER COMPANY MABOU MINES’
OBIE AWARD-WINNING MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE
“The whole experience is so fascinating—thrilling here, confounding there—that it
must be seen.” —New York Times
Mabou Mines DollHouse
Photo: Richard Termine
Minneapolis, October 14, 2005—Legendary experimental theater
company Mabou Mines returns to the Walker Art Center with the Obie
Award–winning Mabou Mines DollHouse, vanguard director Lee Breuer’s
beautifully radical and unpredictable adaptation of the Ibsen classic, on
Wednesday–Saturday, November 9–12, at 8 pm, and Saturday–Sunday,
November 12–13, at 2 pm, in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater.
Still shockingly relevant, this tale of a suffocating marriage and the
growing 19th-century feminist consciousness is viewed through an
upended prism of proportion and scale: literally manifesting the power
struggles in the work, the male actors are no taller than four feet, while the
female actors tower at six feet plus. Presented with a deft touch of magical
and psychological realism, this doll’s house is transformed from bourgeois
tragedy into cutting comedy with a deep and poignant bite, replete with a
chorus of marionettes. Contains brief nudity.
Directly following the Friday, November 11, performance, Mabou Mines
director Lee Breuer and Walker senior curator Philip Bither will participate
in a post-performance discussion.
Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theater company established in 1970 and
based in New York City, emphasizes the creation of new work from
original texts and the use of existing texts staged from a specific point of
view. Over the years, members of the company have included JoAnne
Akalaitis, William Raymond, Greg Mehrten, Ellen McElduff, L.B. Dallas,
Philip Glass, and David Warrilow, along with the present company
members: Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, Terry
O’Reilly, Sharon Fogarty, and Julie Archer. The company’s collaborations
with such composers as Glass, Lenny Picket, Bob Telson, John Zorn,
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Pauline Oliveros, and David Byrne, as well as esteemed visual artists,
comprise a unique collaborative history.
The composition of the company is the result of years of shared work in
the United States and abroad. The six members comprise the present
artistic directorate, making all decisions concerning repertory and touring;
function as actors, writers, designers, and technicians; and serve as the
producers of each season as well as members of the Board of Directors.
Mabou Mines was named after a community in Nova Scotia near which
the founding members of the company (Akalaitis, Breuer, Maleczech,
Glass, and Warrilow) created The Red Horse Animation in 1970. In the
past three decades, Mabou Mines has produced eight pieces by Samual
Beckett, six of which have been world premieres of texts not originally
written for the theater.
Mabou Mines DollHouse
Photo: Richard Termine
Lee Breuer
Company founding member Breuer’s most recent work with Mabou Mines
is as director of Red Beads, Animal Magnetism, and Peter and Wendy,
which won five OBIE Awards, a Drama League Award, and an American
Theater Wing Award. In 1990, he adapted and directed Mabou Mines
Lear—a gender reversed production of King Lear.
In the early 1970s, he adapted and directed three works by Beckett for
Mabou Mines—Play, Come and Go, and The Lost Ones—all of which
received OBIEs. He is the author and director of Mabou Mines’ trilogy
Animations, including The B. Beaver, The Red Horse, and The Shaggy
Dog Animation. The Shaggy Dog was awarded the OBIE for Best Play in
1978. In 1980 his play A Prelude to a Death in Venice received OBIEs for
both his direction and his script. He also wrote Hajj for Mabou Mines,
which opened at The Public Theater and toured in the U.S., Japan, Brazil,
Korea, and Russia.
His theater work outside Mabou Mines includes The Tempest for Joseph
Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, and Lulu for Robert Brustein’s American
Repertory Theater, as well as his music-theater collaborations as author
and director with composer Bob Telson. These include Sister Suzie
Cinema, which premiered at The Public Theater and was televised on the
PBS series Alive From Off Center; and The Gospel at Colonus, (adapted
from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus), a co-commission of the Walker Art
Center which premiered at The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave
Festival, and was performed on Broadway at The Lunt-Fontanne Theater
in 1988. Breuer was nominated for a Tony Award for the book. Gospel was
televised on the PBS series Great Performances. It received numerous
awards, including the 1984 OBIE Best Musical and the ASCAP Popular
Music Award. Breuer and Telson’s most recent collaboration was The
Warrior Ant, which ran at Alice Tully Hall and at The Harvey at Brooklyn
Academy of Music.
Breuer’s published work includes La Divina Caricatura (Green Integer
Press), Animations: A Trilogy for Mabou Mines (Performing Arts Journal
Publication), Sister Suzie Cinema: The collected Poems and Performances
MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE NO. 96 2
Mabou Mines DollHouse
Photo: Richard Termine
1976-1986 (Theater Communications Group Publications), inclusion of A
Prelude to Death in Venice in TCGs New Plays USA 1, and The Gospel at
Colonus (TCG). He has been awarded playwriting grants and fellowships
from CAPS, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller
Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation.
He was a Japan-United States Friendship Commission exchange fellow
and delivered the opening address of the Beckett Chair at Trinity College
in Dublin. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship for theater studies in
India. He was co-chairman of the directing department at Yale School of
Drama from 1986-1989 and was on the faculty at Stanford University until
1999. In 1997 he was awarded a fellowship from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is currently a 2005/06 Radcliff
College Bunting Fellow.
Tickets to Mabou Mines DollHouse are $25 ($13 Walker members) on
Wednesday; $25 ($20 Walker members) on Thursday, Saturday and
Sunday matinees; $32 ($26 Walker members) on Friday and are available
by contacting the Walker Art Center box office at 612.375.7600 or
walkerart.org/tickets.
Special funding for DollHouse was provided by The Peter Jay Sharp
Foundation, The Blue Ridge Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., Lawton Wehle
Fitt and James McClaren Foundation, Jes Scheuer, Jo Mellicker and
Fredrick Sherman. Originally produced for Mabou Mines by Lisa Harris,
Associate Producer Dovetail Productions and Robert Blacker, Mabou
Mines DollHouse was developed as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s
Jonathan Larson Lab 2002 and Sundance Institute Theater Laboratory
2003.
The Walker Art Center's Performing Arts Program is generously supported
by funds from the Doris Duke Charitable Dance Foundation through the
Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment
Fund.
Walker Art Center programming is made possible by its Premier Partners:
Best Buy, General Mills, Target, Star Tribune, and WCCO-TV.
Promotional partner Mpls. St. Paul Magazine.
The Walker Art Center is located at 1750 Hennepin Avenue—where Hennepin meets
Lyndale—one block off Highways I-94 and I-394, Minneapolis.
For public information, call 612.375.7600, or visit walkerart.org.
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