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Glass Guignol

Show poster for Glass Guignol
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Glass Guignol

Opening Night: December 6, 2017
Closing: December 23, 2017
Theater: Mabou Mines

Our newest work, Glass Guignol, is inspired by the complex relationship between Tennessee Williams and his sister Rose. Framed through Williams’ “The Two Character Play,” and interwoven with iconic narrative from many other Williams plays, short stories and poems, Glass Guignol invites us to explore the constellation of questions this fascinating and troubled writer raises through a kaleidoscope of identities, histories, and secrets. Both metaphoric and literal, Glass Guignol explores the nature of the creative process, its triumphs…and its terrors.  Indeed, a puppet version of Mary Shelley, who knows a thing or two about fear and monsters, offers real-time commentary via texting.
Glass Guignol is Lee Breuer’s latest work. Since co-founding Mabou Mines’ nearly 50 years ago, he has been delighting, challenging, provoking, and always entertaining audiences all over the world.  Maude Mitchell, Breuer’s collaborator on this work, plays ‘the sister’ and Greg Mehrten is ‘the brother,’ both transforming into characters from several Williams works.   Added to the mix is Breuer’s always surprising take on classic texts that lead us to new understandings of the writers and ourselves.  His exploration of Williams and Shelley is further informed by the philosophies of two of our favorite provacateurs: Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry.

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Alexis
Soloski

December 11, 2017

Blow out your candles, Laura. And close your eyes. You might not want to see this.

“Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play” sutures together several of Tennessee Williams’s dramas, using his relationship with his sister, Rose Williams, as the thread. The first production at Mabou Mines’ purpose-built theater in the East Village, it is a Southern Gothic creation, minus the Southern — part literary exegesis, part horror show, part psychotherapy session. With gorillas.

In childhood, Tennessee and Rose enjoyed what their mother called a “wild intimacy,” but the bond frayed in adolescence as Rose’s behavior grew more erratic. After she threatened to kill her father, she was committed to a mental institution where she received a diagnosis of schizophrenia and later underwent, to Tennessee’s enduring guilt, a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy.

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