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Carmen Disruption by Simon Stephens

City Garage at Bergamot Station Arts Center
Santa Monica, CA

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Carmen Disruption by Simon Stephens

"I'll gather my breath. I'll walk out of my room. I'll know exactly where I'm going to go. The voice in my head tells me exactly where to go."

An opera singer lost in the city. A gorgeous male prostitute. A tough-talking taxi driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone's looking for something they cant find in this US premiere of acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens's strange and beautiful play that re-imagines Bizet's opera Carmen and explores the possibility of love in a fractured urban world.
The Singer, a mezzo-soprano who criss-crosses Europe playing the title role in Carmen has arrived in an unidentified city to do so again, but a random incident causes her already nebulous sense of self to start unravelling. Carmen, here a busy rent boy, has a disastrous encounter with a client that shakes his sense of self. Don Jose is a taxi-driving mother pining for her son. Meanwhile, a suicidal young girl, dumped by her boyfriend, is the bereft Micaela, and a corrupt futures trader assumes the role of Escamillo. These are lonely souls, yearning for love, home, a sense of self and real connection in an age of superficial digital communication and narcissistic, illusory identities. Simons uses broken shards of Bizet's opera to fashion a mosaic of monologues about our infatuation with technology and digital communication, less a recreation of the opera than a deconstruction of it, reflecting on the strangeness of a professional singer's life and the aching disconnection at the center of our atomized contemporary world.

Adult language and situations.

Simon Stephens is the Olivier and Tony Award-winning author of Heisenberg, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, On the Shore of the Wide World, Pornography, Punk Rock, and many others.

"Fascinating to watch. Director Frederique Michel and designer Charles Duncombe have given it a handsome and visually stunning production, stylized and ritualized. The cast is uniformly strong, with no weak links."
Top Ten Recommended! Stage Raw

I find myself lucky to find myself on the list to see shows at Santa Monicas City Garage, where theatre routinely eschews the naturalistic for the ritual, the realism of cinema in favor of the dream made flesh. Carmen Disruption, by Simon Stephens, make for an excellent example of this.In truth, for the vast majority of the show (nearly two hours) characters speak not to anyone specific but rather to the audience, making us utterly passive members of the cast. Passive because we dont get to tell our tales, nor ask any questions or offer one word to these five people who keep spewing their souls in front of us. Are these people us, in the same way they are in quite a real manner their counterparts in Carmen? Such ends up as the challenges facing we the audience, a subtle but deep interactionproviding we listen hard enough. Which seems rather the point.

David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses

Location

City Garage at Bergamot Station Arts Center (View)
2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
United States

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Attendees

Ilya G.

Los Angeles, CA United States

Oct 11, 2017 10:54 AM

Ilya G.

Los Angeles, CA United States

Oct 11, 2017 10:54 AM

Hamza H.

Riverside, CA United States

Oct 10, 2017 9:43 PM

Hamza H.

Riverside, CA United States

Oct 10, 2017 9:43 PM

T. L.

Santa Monica, CA United States

Oct 08, 2017 7:35 AM

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