Necessary Monsters

Poster design by Matt Rodin

Every year, I create a new theatre piece with my senior acting students at Boston Conservatory.  It's always a very collaborative, interesting, enjoyable process.  It was in this class that The Hotel Nepenthe came into being.  Last year, we adapted James Baldwin's devastating Giovanni's Room.

This year our source text is Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings.  Instead of an adaptation using Borges' text, our result is a new play about 14 disparate people on a doomed airplane that contains each passenger's story within another story: a film within a book within a dream within an hallucination.  Direction and text by myself, with additional text and staging by the class.  I also got to design the sound and lights, which was fun.

The title comes from the preface of the book.  Borges describes some monsters as "necessary": we make them up in order to understand the world.

Hope you can see it!  We open this weekend only, and it's free!

For reservations, call the Box Office:  617-912-9222