Background

Multi-media performance by → ↑ → based on realizing Andy Warhol's novel A on stage.

Credits

Direction - Philip Brophy
Performers - Philip Brophy, Alan Gaunt, Anthony Montemurro, Jayne Stevenson, Prue Van der Cratts, Ralph Traviato & Roger

1977

LATROBE UNI UNION ARTS FESTIVAL - Menzies Theatre, Melbourne

Overview

From the original programme note

(...) As a relatively faithful adaptation from the novel, A is uncomfortable, boring, and quite possibly meaningless. And this is precisely because the play - like the novel - has played with the conventions/expectations of its medium. Much more than the novel could ever do, A as a play plays with a various number of levels of temporal reality - which consequently throws at the audience a number of locations for them within the play. Confusion arise from the audience's inability to simultaneously locate themselves in all these positions to assimilate the various levels of temporal reality. Some of theses bands of time are part of the novel's dialogue, and some are part of the real-time-now-in-this-theatre. A the novel has no logical construction to work with as far as traditional narratives go and so it would be incongruous to give it that logical narrative to work within the conventions of theatre.The novel is purely recorded time. The play plays with the conventions of theatre by exploiting levels of temporal reality.

Technical

The reading of A as a script or text is undertaken by the following performative 'characters':
1. someone reading aloud the novel
2. someone reading the novel silently to themselves
3. someone watching television
4. someone doing homework and ignoring everything happening on stage
5. someone audio-taping everything on stage
6. someone occasionally bringing in drinks and food for everyone on stage
7. someone onstage watching the play

a production