On Saturday, November 18th, at 7:30 PM at the 14th Street Y, LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture will kick off its 10th season with DRUNK, an intoxicating evening of art, performance and Jewish texts. Below, theater artists Brandon Woolf and Jon Adam Ross serve up an artistic aperitif.
Egg Dream Procedural // Brandon Woolf
Two of our DRUNK texts, Midrash Vayikra Rabbah and Midrash Tanhuma, ironically document the ways a father’s sons subject him to great humiliation as punishment for his excessive substance abuses. These texts poke fun at, or perhaps even mock, the “pious” sons as annoying, bourgeois, uptight, grudge-holding assholes.
In my performance for DRUNK, I try to re-ironize the humiliation central to both stories and reconsider the kinds of humiliation — psychic, social, spiritual — that Falstaffian fathers also cause their children.
Both tales are orally fixated. The sons in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah discover their father lying on the ground in a cemetery nursing the teat of a wine skin. The children in Midrash Tanhuma pour slime into a drunkard’s mouth.
My DRUNK piece constructs a spiked egg-cream out of the imagery on hand: White Milk, Brown (Cocoa) Slime, Alcohol, and add Seltzer of course – since these are Jew stories after all. This loaded co2-coction embodies the great tensions within both texts; a drinkable and dangerously-delicious dialectic of misery and enjoyment, humiliation and revelry.
We look forward to seeing you at the Y for a loaded encounter between father and son. Do join us on an empty stomach!
Carnal Regrets of the Patriarchs: A Triptych // Jon Adam Ross
In my piece, three men from the Book of Genesis emerge from their beds with carnal regrets.
The characters in any great story often make choices they later regret. Commonly, those choices are influenced by mind-affecting substances like alcohol, drugs, God, or in the case of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a sacred text if ever there was one — fairy dust.
So it stands to reason that in the best-selling book of all time, the Torah, there would be characters caught in the same cycle: imbibing, acting and regretting. And some of these regretful actions took place between the sheets!
I’ve selected three such moments for DRUNK and created a triptych of monologues exploring the carnal regrets of the patriarchs.
Come experience a post-coitus therapy session for hungover Mesopotamian men!