Reza Abdoh

Join us for a screening of Reza Abdoh’s extraordinary, site-specific work Father was a Peculiar Man, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov staged in New York City’s Meatpacking District in the summer of 1990. Produced by Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts, Father was a Peculiar Man showed how brilliantly Reza applied his specific site-based approach that he developed in Los Angeles to New York City’s urban infrastructure. One of the goals of En Garde Arts’s site-specific journeys through New York’s Meatpacking District was to use the local architecture as a theatrical set while at the same time evoking and playing with the history of the place. The half-deserted cobblestone streets south of Chelsea enhanced the play’s nineteenth-century references. The neighborhood’s past as both a meatpacking and transportation hub via the High Line trains as well as a former center for after-hours sex clubs merge as perfect background for Reza’s spectacular tableaus of gluttony and lust.

Ricky is a young man who takes care of his sick mother. His father hovers at the edge of the picture, so Ricky provides for himself and his mom through prostitution, running errands, and acting as a caregiver for a blind man. Through the course of the film, Ricky befriends Janey, a young woman he finds beaten by her ex-boyfriend, and Trenn, a mysterious young man in trouble with the law. The three of them navigate a dark and confusing world. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.

Quotations From a Ruined City was first performed as a workshop production for the Los Angeles Festival in a former shoe store on Hollywood Boulevard. The production subsequently moved to a vacant pajama factory in New York's meatpacking district and went on to be presented by multiple European presenters. It was Abdoh's final work. "Quotations from a Ruined City is a sort of apocalyptic follies: an evening of song, dance, poetry, nudity and torture set in a world whose center has clearly long ceased to hold. Created and directed by the gifted young theatrical cult artist Reza Abdoh, the work is a kaleidoscopic catalogue of images of decay and destruction that range through the centuries and around the globe."--New York Times, 1994.

The world premiere in 1990 of an avant-garde, queer retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Tommy) and Eurydice (Dora Lee), focusing on an antagonistic couple who find themselves exploited by Orpheus's overbearing and sexually-predatory boss.

A raucous, angry exorcism of relationships and assorted fears, shadowed by the Big One: the plague of AIDS.

The impact of wunderkind theatre director Reza Abdoh's explosive work is finally brought to light twenty years after his death of AIDS, with live performance footage and interviews with those closest to him.

"Minamata is the name of a fishing village in Japan," said the writer-director ("Peep Show," "Eva Peron," "Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn and Watched the Moon Go Down"), who wrote the piece with Mira-Lani Oglesby. "Chisso, a company that makes parts for plastic, dumped mercury waste into the water supply and the fishermen got sick. A high percentage of the villages depended on fish and fishing so their livelihoods dried up too. "The story of Minamata is just the departure point for the play," the writer said. "It's the ghost behind the play, the shadow over it. The piece is a meditation on beliefs, ways of thinking, how operatives in the system create a way of thinking that makes it possible to destroy life in order to improve it. There's a thesis that in order to progress you have to allow for destruction. No. You cannot buy into that way of thinking, because it's erroneous and hurtful."

"The Law of Remains" is a blood-soaked pageant of contemporary Grand Guignol depicting mass murder, sexual mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism simulated by actors portraying the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (named Jeffrey Snarling in the script) and Andy Warhol and his entourage. The work is divided into seven scenes, scattered over two floors of the hotel, that are intended to trace the soul's journey as described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Short film by Reza Abdoh.

An avant-garde video film short in which actors in various languages, states of dress and undress, standing or lying prone, pontificate about Geraldo Rivera's interview with Charles Manson (as well as the Greek myth of Medea), chopped and edited with off-screen directions and asides by the filmmakers and crew, to a state of borderline incomprehensibility.

Staged in a loft on Lafayette Street, across from the Public Theatre, the piece used the film adaptation of Kyle Onstott’s 1957 novel, “Mandingo,” as its primary script. Sitting on cushions on the floor, audience members had to crane their necks to see the proceedings. Enter Moishe Pipik (the amazing Tony Torn), a long-nosed Jewish character in a huckster’s checked suit. When he pisses in a pot of earth, a money tree springs up. Moishe has a friend, Blaster, a black teen-age junkie and drug dealer. They’re refugees, in a sense—racist and anti-Semitic parodies of Jewish liberal identification with blackness. Sometimes they hang out as if they were on a talk show, their chatter intercut with all that “Mandingo” mess, Mandingo’s black phallus looming in the minds of the white people who constructed their dream of an antebellum South on black backs.

This video was created and projected during the performance of The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990). "The use of the rear-screen video in Hip-Hop hooks you into the psyche of the world outside as well as the psyche of the world inside. When the Captain throws the coffin through the window, you see a world that shatters. The boy behind the window represents the forces behind the window, which are facing us but which we choose not to see. At the start of the play, the figure behind the window, which was before reproduced, is now, at the end of the play, alive. That is translated through light into space, and in space translated to motion. On one level it is completely reproduced, it is not actual; on another level, it's actual, and that is only possible when you are using different media." —Reza Abdoh

A collagistic nightmare vision of psycho-sexual abuse.