Scapegoats
(in progress)
Directed by: Thomas Richards
Assistant director: Jessica Losilla-Hébrail
With: Terence Cranendonk and Debora Totti
Written by: Terence Cranendonk, Debora Totti, Jessica Losilla-Hébrail and Thomas Richards
Residency in Akron, Ohio, USA
In December of 2022 and January of 2023, Theatre No Theatre will carry forward a two-month residency in Akron, Ohio to collaborate with two local artists on a live performance entitled Scapegoats.
originally worked on as a live Zoom performance
The dramatic premise remains that of a Zoom therapy session, comprising now the performers’ actions in the performance space as well as a projection of the Zoom camera’s view on a large screen. This new conception presents exciting artistic possibilities for expanding the scope of the acting structures through the utilization of space and the framing of the stage composition.
Sometimes comic, sometimes brutal
A married couple Zooms in for a virtual session with their couple’s therapist. The session starts out as a standard therapy session, but gradually spirals into a fugue of the two partners’ dreams, deliriums, fantasies, and ecstasies. Their journey to uncover their personal “unsaid” —sometimes comic, sometimes brutal— brings them face to face with problems of togetherness and aloneness, as they struggle to identify and loosen knots that have formed between them. With laughter and self-irony, they encounter their need to compete for position in the eyes of their therapist, as well as the world, and their humorous and vicious competition to be recognised as the one who has made the greatest sacrifice, finally even carries them to identify with two of history’s greatest martyrs, Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.
A Married couple
in real life
The creative process began during an online four-week Master Course that performers Terence Cranendonk and Debora Totti took with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in March of 2021. Scapegoats is being created from the personal experiences, memories, writings, and imaginings of Totti and Cranendonk—a married couple in real life—interwoven with pieces of ancient Gnostic texts, legends of Mary Magdalene, as well as fragments from the short novel, The Escaped Cock, by D.H. Lawrence.
