Sorry, Atlantis: Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge
“Premiere:
Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA
September 21, 2017
Written and directed by Asher Hartman
Tim Reid, Assistant Director
Created in collaboration with Michael Bonnabel, Philip Littell, Zuty Lorz, Paul Outlaw, Chelsea Rector and Joe Seely
Creative Team: Ian Byers-Gamber, Chris Candelaria, Nina Caussa, Chu-Hsuan Chang, Bob Dernberger, Paul Fraser, Brian Getnick, Curt Lemieux, Diego Palacios, Michele Yu and Saskia Wilson-Brown”
In a troubled world not unlike our own, two lizard-men tumble from the sky to an abandoned jetty by the sea. Inhabited only by a sad sack Psyclops, a satanic bird, and a sexy snail, the jetty becomes a raunchy boys’ room, an Edenic dope yard of pleasure and sick until one day...Daddy’s home. Soon hazy memories of war, incest and parricide fracture the minds of gods and animals and the humans cloaked within them. Smelly, crusty, an full of slime, Sorry, Atlantis: Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge is a comedy about childhood wounds, sexual repression, and the lure of power.
“As a test of the limits of perception and intelligibility, the staging is richly matched by the dramatic material Hartman supplies us with. Of the actors, Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely spend the longest on stage, as the Lizard Twins. Their speech emerges from a monosyllabic sea that occasionally curdles into casual profundity. Their kinetic dispositions, exaggerated enunciation and facial contortions convey the persistent immaturity that family members beat each other into. And beat the Twins do, utilizing limbs, tongues and, most unforgettably, the misshapen puppet penises that burst greedily out of their undone flies.”
- Rossen Ventzislavov, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly full essay