new beast theatre works

Drawing from the spare prose of Raymond Carver’s short story, “Gazebo,” New Beast Theatre Works presents a new approach to opera that spans memory and imagination, told through prose, song, and dramatic performance. One Thing, and Everything Else is an experiment in combining the most compelling aspects of opera, drama and short fiction in a hybrid of storytelling, theater and song.

Half-drunk, in the fading light of their relationship, Holly (Ruth Bistrow/Pamela Maurer) and Duane (Eddie Bennett/James Whittington) lock themselves within a motel suite, and decide to have-it-out one last time.   A close look at the frayed edge of their love reveals strands of what it once was, what it might have been, and what they each have lost. As they retrace their life together, from early, easy moments of love, to more recent times soured with booze, adultery, and neglect, they struggle to answer the question “What do we do now?”

One Thing, and Everything Else

Director David Amaral teamed up with indie musician Joshua Dumas to create something like a Restoration-era semi-opera, based loosely on Raymond Carver's short story "Gazebo." Success was a long shot, given their six-week development period and Dumas's complete lack of musical training (he even had to look up the alto saxophone's range on Wikipedia). But watching their sophisticated, richly nuanced 65-minute finished piece, you’d think they've been creating such works for years. Dumas's haunting, atmospheric score--Eno meets Gorecki--provides a poignant foil to Carver's portrait of a hard-drinking, luckless married couple struggling to overcome the husband's infidelity. In splintered scenes, each character is played by two actors--a present and future self, reaching across chasms of regret. It's graceful, engrossing and heartbreaking. --Justin Hayford

Press: from The Chicago Reader