Storm Still
Opening Night: February 19, 2011
Closing: March 6, 2011
Theater: P.S. 122
Outside an abandoned school, war rages. Inside, three kids perform King Lear, unsupervised, for years. Further inside, the mad King debates the purpose of theatre with his Fool, a licensed therapist.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
February 27, 2011
There comes a point in “Storm Still” when even the most patient theatergoer will stop forgiving its faults. That point occurs when a man, naked except for a Tarzan-like loincloth, is spanked repeatedly by another character, then bent over a chair and sodomized with a walking stick — a stick that is thrown to the floor and picked up in the mouth of an actor portraying a dog.
READ THE REVIEW
February 25, 2011
Let me first say that I really like the Nonsense Company, a strange trio of musicians and poets who make experimental music theater out of diffident conversation and nearly-hidden compositional structures. When they showed up in town with The Conversation Storm/The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, the seemingly modest show rocked those who saw it; we saw two art forms joining at a microcellular level, with music and text intermixing even more intimately than they do in opera. But in Storm Still—their dispiriting and lugubrious po-mo construction with occasional moments of grace—the trio hits an extremely sour chord. Why?
READ THE REVIEW
February 28, 2011
The three members of the Nonsense Company try awfully hard to imbue this multilayered riff on Act 3, Scene 6 of "King Lear" with a sense of anarchic fun. Unfortunately, the play’s freewheeling form is something of a Trojan horse, hiding a core of donnish theater-geek in-jokes; it’s as if the Firesign Theatre (whom I never understood either) had weighed down one of its druggy surrealist sketches with ponderous references to the Oresteia and Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. It’s erudite, intelligently acted, highly theatrical, and it made me want to scream.
READ THE REVIEW
February 20, 2011
The Nonsense Company’s Storm Still is described in the press materials as "an extended meditation on Act Three, Scene Six of King Lear."
READ THE REVIEW
February 24, 2011
Storm Still, the latest creation of Nonsense Company writer/performers Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gricevich, and Ryan Higgins now at P.S. 122, strings together a series of seemingly disconnected scenes riffing on and deconstructing King Lear at an alarmingly fast and free-associative pace. And while the two-hour piece could be edited, the final result is an impressive exploration of one of Shakespeare’s most misunderstood kings.
READ THE REVIEW