![]() Mary (Melissa Kenney Shepherd) is a full-time mom. When dinner guests arrive, though, things get a bit touchy. They installed a living room theater with a light board and plenty of seating, where paying customers can sit and watch a family in its natural state? And yes, by the way, there’s a bedroom theater, too (though we never see it).įor Archie, Eudora and their daughter Dakota (Casandre Medel) this is an inevitable improvement on reality TV it’s reality theater. They considered installing a webcam, but a webcam doesn’t offer the direct thrill of having a live audience, so Archie and Eudora went one better. Eudora is a philosophical type who argues that “The great drama of humanity is the struggle against the ruthless anonymity of life.” We need an audience, she says, to validate the significance of our lives. Archie wears a spectacular mustache, and once gave a Dadaist-inspired commencement speech that involved simulating death by plague. On the weird couples scale, these folks are in Gomez and Morticia territory. ![]() Wife Eudora (Amy Steiger) is a death counselor, who coaches people through the transition – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and sometimes why. Husband Archie (Scot Atkinson, who also directed the production) is a performance artist “enjoying an extended arts grant from the government.” Not from the National Endowment of the Arts, you understand, but in the form of unemployment compensation. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, Youtube and surveillance cameras can turn everything we do – whether abusing a tow company cashier, pouring a bucket of ice over our heads, or simply being part of an audience at an event where someone else is performing – instantly into a kind of performance.Īnd when the family at the center of William Missouri Downs’ “Mad Gravity,” which made its local premiere last week at the Bard’s Town Theatre, takes things to their logical extreme, the results make for a riotous night of screwball comedy. All the world is a stage – or a screen, or a performance space. In our time, the metaphor has become a reality. When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” he meant it as metaphor.
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