This was no ordinary recital. Candlelight, carefully chosen costumes, and the spoken word of Dante’s immortal poetry turned the performance into a ritual of music, literature, and theater.
In this show, there are two rounds of questions where the friends of single participants come up on stage to answer game-show-style questions on their behalf, helping them “win” a date. The questions range from romantic ones to silly and playful topics.
This show runs like a collection of vignettes, almost, circling themes of desire, family, identity and suffering; a woman both going through the motions and drowning under the weight of her unspoken screams.
Köster and team have pulled together an incredible staging for the series of scenarios, an imaginative, twisted take on parental abandonment and filial devotion.
The piece begins, rewinds, restarts, stops, and progresses, degrading in the way that a VHS tape would after too many viewings.
Affably accurate-but-imprecise, he served as an enjoyably unreliable tutor, using the lecture as a framework to spin off into a blend of gameshow, prop comedy, and improvisational music.