The Flatiron Hex
Opening Night: May 16, 2015
Closing: May 30, 2015
Theater: Dixon Place
“The Flatiron Hex” is a solo puppet performance that tells the story of Wylie Walker, a contract shaman who works for NYORG—a city in the middle of a swamp. Wylie uses his unusual talents to solve problems and do routine maintenance on the city’s interweb bio-technology. Due to the haunted land and sentient mainframes, Wylie faces many occult adversaries. Storms constantly threaten to destroy NYORG, but a secret feature of the Flatiron building keeps the storms at bay, that is as long as the cloud-code is cracked and the correct ritual procedure is followed. Award-winning puppeteer/performance & visual artist James Godwin, whose previous collaborations include Julie Taymor, David Bowie, the Muppets & even Aerosmith, utilizes remarkable puppets, masks & mystical neo-noir visuals to tell a story set in a parallel, near-future NYC filled with ghosts, elemental spirits & evil demigods.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
May 18, 2015
James Godwin’s deliriously weird puppet show, “The Flatiron Hex,” takes place in a New York only a little different from the one we know and sporadically love: “a maze of ghosts and minor gods, floating in the middle of a toxic swamp.” A postmodern assemblage of the eerie and the icky, it follows Wylie Walker, a plumber, I.T. expert and high-level shaman, as he works to protect the city from a catastrophic storm. At the start of the play, Mr. Godwin enters the Dixon Place stage wearing a mask like a gazelle’s skull and murmuring ominously, an almost cozy entrance compared with what comes after. The plot that unfurls somehow whirls together Mickey Spillane, H. P. Lovecraft, an AppleCare employee manual and occasional gouts of blood. Though Mr. Godwin most often plays our hero, Wylie, he also voices the other characters, and manipulates them, too. Some are dolls, some are marionettes, some are paper cutouts, some are stranger than that. Much of the staging involves overhead projectors and when the light bulb on one broke during a preview performance, Mr. Godwin had to improvise, frenetically, while a couple of technicians repaired it. “Please reset your imaginations,” Mr. Godwin said when he was ready to go on.
READ THE REVIEW