Blue Wizard / Black Wizard

Photo by Michael de Angelis

“Terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Mac Wellman, playwright

A musical fantasia depicting an epic duel between two opposing wizard philosophies in a modern and mundane age. Ideals of truth, knowledge, scientific advancement, information consciousness, network connectivity and excellence battle against beauty, nature, simplicity, holistic systems, magical realism, and intuition as the wizards rise on smoke emitting platforms. As the two wizards joust amidst a digital backdrop, ancient ideals of spirituality and morality contrast against a culture that promotes the shallow, quick and callous. Ultimately Blue Wizard / Black Wizard subversively explores the effects of instant access network technology and internet addiction on the soul.

Artists Involved: Music and text by Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy; performed by Eliza Bent, Nikki Calonge, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, and Dave Malloy; video by Michale De Angelis; costumes by Oana Botez.

Lead Artists: DAVE MALLOY is a composer/performer/sound designer. He is one of the co-creator/performers of Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s Winterreise (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, American Repertory Theater; Special Citation OBIE Award), and the composer for the Brooklyn based ensemble Banana Bag & Bodice. He has written six full length musicals, including Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage (2011 Edinburgh Herald Angel, New Yorker Best of 2009, 2008 Glickman Award), Beardo (SF Bay Guardian, SF Chronicle Best of 2011), Sandwich, Clown Bible (“Best Play of the Year,” “Best Music,” East Bay Express 2007) and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on Tolstoy’s War & Peace premiering this fall at Ars Nova. Awards include a 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant and the 2009-11 NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Theatre Designers. He lives in Brooklyn.

ELIZA BENT is a playwright/performer pursuing an MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College under Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. Bent’s plays include Karma Kharms (or yarns by Kharms), an adaptation of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing, featuring a cast of 16 and live origami set (Target Margin Labs, Mar. 2012); Asleep at the Wheel, a loose confederation of scenes depicting life at a non-profit office (reading at the Invisible Dog); She of the Voice, an adaptation of Hari Kunzru’s short story Magda Mandela (production at PS 122’s undergroundzero festival 2009); Blue Dress Reduction, about the trials and tribulations of being a bridesmaid (production at PS 122 undergroundzero festival 2010); and Toilet Time with Eliza Bent, a tour de toots (productions at Dixon Place’s Little Theatre, Catch!, and the Great Plains Theatre Conferences). Bent is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist and the recipient of a U.S. Embassy of Reykjavik grant. She is a Half Straddle company member (performances in The Seagull (thinking of you), Football/In the Pony Palace, Nurses in New England, Family, The Knockout Blow) and an associate editor of American Theatre magazine.

Upcoming: The Hotel Colors at the Bushwick Starr May 2013 and Blue Wizard / Black Wizard at the Incubator Arts Project in June 2013.

davemalloy.com | elizabent.wordpress.com