Event

Public Domain #1: Garrett Zuercher directs Philoctetes by Sophocles

The Tank and Full Circle Theatre Company are producing a monthly staged reading series featuring plays in the public domain with no copyright restrictions. Once a play has entered public domain, it belongs to everyone. It becomes ours to do with as we please. As such, we thought it'd be cool if we offered up some of the creative decision-making to our audiences. We've selected our first seven plays, and seven directors with very different approaches. We had our audiences assign a play to each director.

Our first presentation, in September, is Philoctetes, directed by Garrett Zuercher.

What do you get when you mix treachery, morality, wounds that won't heal, Heracles's bow and arrows, a chorus of sailors, and the fate of the Trojan War? The answer: a legend that three of the most celebrated Greek playwrights wrote about. After contracting an obnoxiously smelly snakebite on the way to Troy, Philoctetes finds himself abandoned by his shipmates en route. Ten years later, Odysseus returns with Neoptolemus to double down on his deceit by stealing Philoctetes's weapon, which Odysseus needs (according to prophecy) to win the never-ending war.

A deaf actor, director and playwright based in New York City, Garrett Zuercher's work has been seen around the world on stages and screens, both big and small. As a director and playwright, his primary goal is to develop new and innovative methods of combining spoken English and American Sign Language in theatrical works accessible to both hearing and deaf audiences.