… STUNNING!! …
… a lullaby of the tragic …
… What place in the world wouldn’t benefit from this story? …
– ArtYard Audience Members
From Whit MacLaughlin
OBIE and Barrymore Award-winning Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories
… Sebastienne Mundheim, Founder and Artistic Director of White Box Theatre, and her creative team have woven together fact, fiction, and powerful imagery to create a beguiling and lucid portrait of this elusive figure. The result is almost a séance, rendering Kea, a ghostlike but imposing figure, into a forcefully real presence. Quiet, insightful storytelling and lyrics, written and delivered by Mundheim in a respectful, almost scholarly way, combine with an ethereal musical score, and surprising, always evocative puppetry, to create a difficult-to-describe weave of subtle and not-so-subtle effects. One might call the style “epic poetry of objects,” or “cinematic sculpture.”
…The inventiveness of the physical life of the piece is substantial and impressively deep. Rarely have I seen such sophisticated puppetry marshaled towards a truly phantasmagoric assembly of effects.
Taken together, the silence, the sound, the words, and the music cohere into a startlingly concrete biography that reflects powerfully on the life of a true American original, whose complexity and subtlety might render her story too slippery to tell. Mundheim’s trans-medial approach is deployed sensitively and with just the right touch.
… a beautifully crafted, concise performance … SO TIMELY…
… I drove home with a sense of wonder …
– Kohler Foundation Audience Responses
From Bill Adair
Former Program Director at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage of the Pew Charitable Trusts
You said you don’t perceive yourself as a political person but there was a subtext to it and it was political; in the sense that in this time, when trans people are among the most vulnerable in our country, politically, being beat-up on by demagogues constantly. Without it being explicit at all, you’re giving enormous respect, that this person was an extraordinary person, a trans person, and that in itself is a highly political act.
Gender non-conformity and mental illness are aspects of her story that you never name. You take her as she is - and that’s important, without labels.
… experiential and gorgeous ...
… a powerful portrayal of loss …
– ArtYard Audience Members
From Pamela Barnett
Dean of The School of Arts and Communications, The College of New Jersey
When I walked into the performance space, I gasped. I actually did … I had an immediate, visceral recognition that I was entering another world …
I see that obsessional act of creation out of detritus as both touching and heroic. Building upon a foundation that is always unstable, like all of our lives really.