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A man floats on the open ocean, clinging to his best friend - an ever-shrinking bit of iceberg. He gazes below the surface of the water and thinks he sees ... mermaids performing Ibsen's Lady from the Sea? Elsewhere, a salty sea captain shuttles back and forth from the miles-wide vortex in the North Central Pacific known as the Garbage Patch, delivering messages in bottles and smuggling the impossible. Elsewhere still, a marooned sea creature rants and a strange disease is spreading. All will collide in a mythic place called Florida. Inspired by the Weeki Wachee Springs Mermaid Park - one of the nation's oldest roadside attractions (and smallest cities), A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things is a floating fantasia, staged on board a docked barge in Brooklyn's historic Red Hook district. Read the press at Papermag.com and The Brooklyn Rail and the Village Voice and Gothamist and the Huffington Post and Theatre Knights (& Daze). About the Project: Jessica Brater conceived the idea for A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things in 2003 when she read an article in the New York Times about a "mermaid" theme park in Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida. The park was in financial difficulty and in danger of closing. Ownership of the property had been transferred to the town of Weeki Wachee (population: 8). Manatees and crocodiles regularly entered the spring in which the "mermaids" performed their underwater adaptation of The Little Mermaid. The 29-year-old General Manager of the park, herself a former mermaid as well as the Mayor of Weeki Wachee, launched a "Save Our Tails" campaign to prevent closure of this original American roadside attraction. These characters and situations seemed ready-made for the theatre. Brater and the company were intrigued by the struggle between a quirky and unique expression of humanity, the park, and the overwhelming forces of a faceless bureaucratic system that was trying to shut it down. The link between Weeki Wachee and climate change came in 2006 when Brater read an article in The New Yorker about the ocean acidification that is destroying coral reefs and underwater life as we know it. She realized that Weeki Wachee's "Save Our Tails" campaign could be a parallel conservation story, one that mirrors the struggle to preserve and protect the fragile ocean environment. At the same time, the story of Weeki Wachee could express humankind's ancient fascination for the sea and its creatures. The mermaid, after all, embodies the affinity humans feel for the ocean by physically linking the human form with an aquatic one. During the first phase of our research process for A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things, the company shared articles, books, photographs, images and stories about everything from the levels of calcium carbonate required for mollusks to create their shells to sections from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ibsen's Lady from the Sea, and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," from which we have taken our title. We interviewed a scientist in the New York area and visited the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. Our scientific research taught us about the North Central Pacific Gyre, which stretches across nearly ten million square miles between North America and Asia and about Captain Charles Moore, a modern day world explorer, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, CA, to study the flow of plastics in the ocean, particularly those in the field of the gyre. When we learned about Captain Moore, we knew immediately that we had stumbled upon a story that was as ripe with dramatic potential as those literary sources we had collected, and that by intersecting such stories with each other, we might be able to develop a play that is rich enough to reflect the complexity of our subject. We began to think of our dramatic structure in terms of a number of interlocking ecosystems--what happens in one story line affects what happens in another story line, in the same way that the interlocking ecosystems of the ocean cannot be considered separately. We then began to explore physical and vocal approaches to the material (can people move in a school like a group of fish?). For our summer 2007 showing at the Bushwick Starr, we began to develop a "green" set design inspired by the underwater environment. The entire company saved their garbage and recyclables throughout the rehearsal period, a daily reminder of how much plastic we were all generating. Plastic bags became jellyfish, takeout containers became schools of shiny fish, and a giant garbage pile upstage provided any and all props. An old suitcase became a giant prehistoric clam, and a scientist floated downstream on an iceberg made of Styrofoam and plastic wrap. The mermaids of Weeki Wachee were integrated into our plastic world with an Esther Williams-inspired faux synchronized swimming "Dance of the Garbage Gyre" as Robyn is joined by her fellow mermaids, all of whom are finally drowned in a sea of plastic trash. In January 2009, company members traveled to the Weeki Wachee Mermaid Park to meet the "mermaids," including Mayor Robyn Anderson. We held interviews, watched the shows from behind the scenes, shot video footage, created sound recordings, and took photographs that we shared with the company on our return. Our March 2009 showing at Mabou Mines' ToRaNaDa studio focused on incorporating the findings from our trip to Weeki Wachee into the structure of the play. We are thrilled to present the fruits of that long development process in an amazing setting: The Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge in Red Hook, Brooklyn, opening the day after Earth Day. Download the Press Release HERE Download the Program HERE See the Trailer Here:
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