Whammy!



Performance History

 

2010 - Metcalf Theatre, Edwardsville, IL

SIUe Xfest: a festival of alternative theatre and dance

 

2011 - Kranzberg Theatre, St. Louis, MO

 

2013 - Centene Center for Arts and Education, St. Louis, MO

 

2013 - 400 W. Rich, Columbus, OH

 

2013 - CSV Flamboyan Theatre, New York, NY

New York International Fringe Theatre Festival

 

 

Development History

 

Whammy! began in 2008 as an idea – what would happen if you took the idea of “self-help,” and the industry that surrounds it, smashed it together with Stanley Kramer’s 1964 comic masterpiece It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and then looked at this mashup through the lens of a dream. And then there was that damn quote from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book: 





“Why is it possible that to learn more about the Crab Nebula of Taurus,

which is 6,000,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself,

even though you have been stuck with yourself all your life?”

-Walker Percy





In July of 2009, I led a series of developmental workshops in St. Louis.  Over the course of two weeks these questions were discussed and several of the movement and dance sections of the play were created by myself and collaborator Mikey Butane Thomas.   In September, I began working with a group of students from SIUe. The cast and I kept dream journals.  Together, through structured improvisation, we wove these dream images together with song, dance, and text into a preliminary workshop performance that played for two weeks in December of 2009.  And all this time I was reading the self-help books:  books about suicide and sex and addiction and money and depression and drugs and obsession and success and death and love...





"We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply,

like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves,

like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

-Franz Kafka





The play then went through another round of development and had a single performance at SIUE Xfest (a festival of alternative theatre and dance) in June of 2010.  Another year of thinking and reading led to another round of revisions before the play received its professional premiere in St. Louis as part of HotCity Theatre's Greenhouse Series in December of 2011.  





"If you are going to tell people the truth,

you had better make them laugh or they will kill you."​

-Oscar Wilde

 

Whammy! was then submitted to national and international festivals and was selected to perform at the 2013 New York International Fringe Theatre Festival.  It was performed over two weeks at the CSV Cultural Center Flamboyan Theatre where it received stellar reviews and was a critics pick by Time Out New York.

 





Whammy! is is the product of many talented artists and their lively, fertile imaginations and I thank them all for their contributions to the play. St. Louis workshop actors: Lavonne Byers, Carrie Hegdahl, Julie Venegoni and Tyler Vickers. SIUE workshop actors: Maggie Conroy, Rachel Fenton, Rahamses Galvan, Spenser Greentree, Philip Levelling, Sarah McKenney, Anna Skidis. St. Louis premiere actors: Maggic Conroy, Greg Fenner, Kate Frisina, Julie Venegoni and Jeff Skoblow.