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| ARCHIVE SEASON 16 | December 2003 | VORTEX |
Whatever: An American Odyssey Heather Woodbury's "Living Novel"
VORTEX presents performance artist Heather Woodbury in her solo serial production WHAT EVER: An American Odyssey in Eight Acts. In an amazing feat, this groundbreaking writer-performer has created an 8-part odyssey performed over 4 nights, spanning the 20th century and criss-crossing the US. Dudley Saunders directs.
While
this epic comedy unfolds with each installment, this evening has
been constructed with its own dramatic arc. The audience can attend
one evening, view two acts, and leave the theater satiated (or come
back for more). What Ever was a huge hit at The VORTEX from 1996-1998.
Her success with Austin audiences helped catapult her into the international
spotlight. Don’t miss her triumphant return to Austin for
only two short weeks. Riffing on everything from the jazz-age to
the rave-scene, from corporate conscience to Kurt Cobain's ghost,
What Ever follows the personal journeys of ten wildly diverse main
characters across America as they intersect with over 90 others
and their lives and stories converge.
An award-winning and critically acclaimed playwright and performer, Heather Woodbury has forged a unique kind of drama that combines the immediacy of performance art with the narrative structure and subtle characterizations of a novel. In addition to its NPR broadcasts as a radio-play, hosted by Ira Glass, What Ever is now debuting as a work of experimental fiction with the publishing house Farrrar, Straus Giroux/ Faber.
Funny, outrageous, and ultimately moving, WHAT EVER is a comedic tour-de-force which Woodbury realizes using only her body and voice, without set or costume changes. The story orbits around several related characters, from Skeeter, the Oregon rave kid on a cross-country hitch-hike, to the 85-year-old Violet, a patrician New Yorker with an endless fund of stories of her bohemian past, to Paul, an oil executive grappling with a wife, a mistress and crisis of conscience, to Hell's Kitchen whore Bushie, in a one-woman war with the yuppie condo-owners of West 45th street. The story spins from coast to coast, bound together by the chance meeting of three West Coast rave kids- Clove, Sable , and Skeeter - whose adolescent quests begin and end at fateful raves haunted by "Cobain the Friendly Ghost".
Background
"WHAT EVER" is the result of a dare. A friend challenged
Heather to write and perform every week for a year. She modified
the length to a pregnant nine months, and for thirty-seven consecutive
weeks she wrote and performed a new half-hour in the back of a bar
in NYC's East Village. As characters and plot line emerged, audience
became mid-wife and the "living novel" was born. That
same friend, Dudley Saunders, then edited the original serial into
What Ever: An American Odyssey . This new form went on to gather
acclaim as a ground-breaking literary as well as theatrical invention
which stretches the boundaries of contemporary fiction even as it
echoes the origins of literature in the oral tradition.
Who is Heather Woodbury?
Heather Woodbury is a native of northern California. In her late
teens, she moved to NYC's East Village, and became involved in the
80's performance art scene where she developed her method of generating
material via improvisational writing and performance.
Throughout these years she lived in several NYC neighborhoods, was employed as a go-go dancer, barmaid and cater waiter and criss-crossed the country several times by car, train, bus, and thumb. All of this served to inspire her "performance novel" which she went on to tour as a solo performance extensively in the U.S and Europe. Excerpts of this production have also aired on National Public Radio's This American Life.
Ms. Woodbury has performed at Ireland's Galway and Dublin Festivals, Yale Rep, New York's Public Theater, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, Laurie Anderson's Meltdown Festival in London, Amsterdam's Triple X Festival, among many other venues. Woodbury has received numerous awards as a performer and playwright. She was recently Playwright-in-Residence at Joseph Papp Public Theater where she developed her new "performance novel" Tale of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks. In 2001, she received an award from Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays as well as an NEA Fellowship for developing this new work.
What Critics are saying:
"It is one of the greatest works you've never heard of."- Ira Glass, host of This American Life
"Brilliant, positively Joycean." - The Los Angeles Reader
"an engrossing narrative feat" "A sort of one-woman Nicholas Nickelby for the millennium," - The Village Voice
"a Whitmanesque vision of America at the end of the 20th Century." The Chicago Sun Times
The Irish Times sums it up with "In this new, even more American century it is as urgently relevant as it is deliriously enjoyable."
"Like Danny Hoch's Jails Hospitals and Hip-Hop, and Lily Tomlin’s Signs of Intelligent Life, it is one of the masterworks of the solo form" Jason Zinoman - NY Times
" What if the Great American novel turned out to be a piece of theatre? Heather Woodbury’s astonishing What Ever may be the nearest thing to an American Ulysses. In scale and ambition, her eight hour epic perhaps exceeds even Joyce, for the show is a modern odyssey not for a city, but for a sub-continent" Fintan O'Toole - Irish Times
