Theater: La MaMa E.T.C. / 74A East Fourth Street, New York, NY, 10003
Synopsis:
Stopped Bridge of Dreams takes place in a modern version of the pleasure quarter of a "tea house","floating world" that is an anonymous airplane that circles the globe.With its central story concerning a mother and son who operate the tea house, Stopped Bridge of Dreams will also involve 30 "satellite" plays that reveal the lives of the clients.
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January 30, 2012: If Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams and William Gibson had gotten together, maybe become a little drunk, and decided to pull a literary all-nighter, the resulting collaboration might have had something of the flavor of John Jesurun’s “Stopped Bridge of Dreams.”
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January 24, 2012: To many theatergoers, John Jesurun's multimedia work, Stopped Bridge of Dreams, now at La MaMa, will come off as a confusingly soporific post-modern soap opera. But it may appear differently to those who view it as it unfolds at www.bridgedream.com as Jesurun also intends.
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January 22, 2012: Stopped Bridge of Dreams, the new multimedia performance written, designed and directed by John Jesurun at La MaMa, is a hallucinogenic, sense-assaulting, dreamlike hour and a quarter in the theater. The Ellen Stewart Theatre has been arranged with tennis-court-style seating, with audience against two opposite walls and the actors and action in the center between them. The set is a long table with two different cloths covering each half (they seem to be complements of one another); bisecting the table is a wall or screen. Above the table are two screens on which are projected images—sometimes live video feeds, sometimes pre-recorded monologues, and most of the time ambient background footage of the airplane we're in flying through a night sky. At the sides of the playing space are a few items of furniture and costume pieces; a live camera operator and his equipment is visible at one end of the space. The cameraman and the actors shift location and occasionally change costume in full view of the audience; it should be a distraction but like all of the rest of the constantly shifting environment of this play (for the screens and the table are moved numerous times during the show by the actors) it is in tune with one of the main ideas of Jesurun's work, which is to keep us constantly caught up in a mutating perspective. Nothing is absolute or certain in this world.
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January 25, 2012: A visually impressive multi-media production with a cryptic, abstract story about a whorehouse airplane.
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January 22, 2012: In the 17th century, Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku began writing stories of the pleasure seekers of modern life, hedonistic consumers of art, entertainment, beauty, and sex. The tales became known as "ukiyo zoshi" or "floating world stories," a name that relied on a subtle play on words. The word for "floating" in Japanese sounds similar to the word for "sorrowful," a winking reference by Saikaku to the isolating, sometimes even tragic sentiments that hid behind the comic mask of the urban circus.
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January 23, 2012: Though “Stopped Bridge of Dreams” is based on 17thcentury Japanese writings, its style couldn’t be more contemporary.
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