I’m not particularly stoic, but having grown up in the Northeast, I start to get a little annoyed when all the usual complaints about snow and cold start piling up during the winter—it’s winter, it’s supposed to be snowy and cold.
But, with this winter season having felt particularly rough on New York (at least, if you can believe all those Facebook posts and Gothamist articles…hey, at least we didn’t have it as bad as Boston, right?), it was likely the perfect season for Piehole‘s Old Paper Houses, which grew from the ensemble’s frustration with winter a couple years back, then passed through poetry about New England, transcendentalist communes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, nostalgia…and more.
Sound wild? It is, in the best of ways.
Listen in as director Tara Ahmadinejad and dramaturg (and returning podcast guest) Elliot B. Quick discuss collective creation in Piehole, dioramas, starting a book club to figure out what you want to do next, shifting perspectives, and physical research to get the appropriate action of shoveling show onstage.
(and seriously, there’s more entertainment awaiting you after the show, so be sure to budget some time to stick around and hang!)
“The piece is a meditation on New England, and utopian longing, and the weather, and it cycles through these different perspectives…”
“…it started from us being artists in New York in a winter two years ago, and feeling a lot of utopian longing…”
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To drastically, drastically oversimplify his play—this what happens when an easy pun is chased down to the point where it becomes a complex theatrical statement.