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Description: "La Mano: Tales of the End of the World" (New York Premiere) written and directed by Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya. Cino Theater - Wednesday, August 31 at 7:00PM; Thursday, September 1 at 7:00PM; Friday, September 2 at 7:00PM; Saturday, September 3 at 2:00PM; Sunday, September 4 at 7:00PM. Running time: 70 minutes | Tickets $15.
"La Mano: Tales of the End of the World" theatricalizes three short narratives dealing with apocalypse, chaos, Babel, violence and beauty. Set in a Caribbean island, the stories bridge what we consider true life and hallucination. Based on a new published narrative anthology by Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, "La Mano" centers on three stories of quotidian horror. In "Julia and the Jogger of Cemeteries," an eight-year old girl who fervently believes in the end of the world is confronted by a jogger who runs through cemeteries thinking that the tombstones are as infinite as the world itself. In "Slaughterhouse," the encounter of a mature man with a much younger man who affirms that they had studied together in grade-school serves as a starting point of an exploration of memory and exquisite violence as they walk through phantasmagorical towns on the island. Finally, "Readings from the Apocalypse" meta-theatrically presents a stage director who feels the century has not yet ended and tries to use matter (animate and inanimate) to achieve a staging of the point after the end.
Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya is the founder of Casa Cruz de la Luna, an experimental theatre company based in an old house in the historical district of San Germán, Puerto Rico. In the U.S., his work has been presented and developed by Intermedia Arts, Red Eye Collaboration, Pregones Theatre, Teatro del Pueblo, the Weisman Art Museum, the Guthrie Theatre,the Children's Theatre Company of Minnesota, the Public Theatre, the Lincoln Center's Directors' Lab, HERE Center for the Arts, NoPassport Collective and the Solo Nova Arts Festival at P.S.122. Internationally, his productions have traveled to Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, England and the Netherlands. His theories and practices of "escritura acto" have suggested a way of conceiving the stage as a ground of multiple lines of communication and miscommunication in which the live production and reception of mediated written and spoken words converge. "La Mano," a musical theatre/performance piece, premiered in Puerto Rico in 2010. Adyanthaya's other plays include "Hagiografías (Hagiographies)," "Las Facultades (The Faculties)," winner of the 2007 International Playwriting Award from Casa del Teatro, Dominican Republic and the 2008 Asunción Prize from Pregones Theatre; "Quisimos Tanto a Lydia," featured at the 2008 Latin American Theatre Today Congress; "Prometheus Bound," shown as a special presentation at the American Society for Theatre Research 2009 Conference; and "The Marquis de Sade is Afraid of the Sea," an "escritura acto" ensemble piece which toured the island's universities in 2009. Aravind has been awarded a Jerome Playwriting Fellowship and a McKnight Advancement Grant, both from the Playwrights' Center, and a Jerome Performance Art Fellowship by Intermedia Arts. He is currently an Artist of Color Directing Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. He holds a Ph.D. in theatre historiography from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and an M.D. from Mayo Medical School.
