Home. About Us. Productions. News. Press.

I see theatre going underground, only it won't be from political oppression; it will be from the oppressive influence of pop culture. Pop culture takes a subject, impersonalizes it, commodifies it and sells it back to you. Pop culture takes art, turns it into a fad, and blows it up nationwide. It's the commodification of interesting experiences that are then not special anymore. In a world like this, it is very difficult to find a sense of spiritual ownership, which we crave. Theatre on a small scale often offers an intimate reflection of a community. It's a live dialogue with that community. To keep that dialogue real, you have to stay close to home, get onto a smaller scale and get off the grid of pop culture.

- Mark Russell, Executive Director of Performance Space 122, NYC

Those who came to be identified as Pop artists embraced consumerism as a fitting subject of their art. In turn, the consumer industry itself adopted Pop art as an antidote to the rigidity of high art. In Pop art, the narrative or epic impulse of Abstract Expressionism was replaced with straighforward deplictions of the everyday, and the mass-produced was afforded the same significance as unique works of fine art. Basing their techniques, style, and imagery on certain aspects of mass reproduction, media-derived imagery, and consumer society, Pop artists gleefully eroded the gulf between high art and low art.

- Susan Davidson, on American Pop Icons at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum

Remember, always buy Dementia brand products.

- F T Bonnigan, Spokesperson for the Mild Dementia Continuous-Play Variety Hour

Mild Dementia Continuous-Play Variety Hour

- STATEMENT OF INTENT -

The signature show of Audacity Productions, the mild dementia continuous-play variety hour is the on-going companion troupe that runs parallel to the "main season" (i.e. longer works, fully-produced plays). The aesthetic Audacity is striving for is most clearly evident in the work explored by mild dementia.

The mild dementia continuous-play variety hour will aim to take place on a small portable stage or platform in an intimate setting. The troupe employs an ever-changing program that combines conceptual bits, sketch comedy, performance art, musical revue, rants, plays without words, audience interactions, and structured improvisations.

The troupe shall be a testing ground for new material by emerging artists. A tight-rope walk between the stage proper and the variety show, defining an independent, acerbic, macabre medium all its own.

Performance Issues will revolve around a small, mobile stage/platform and a smallish audience, and an ambience of talk and drink and smoke where the relationship of the performer and the spectator is one of both intimacy and hostility, and always subversion, with nodal points of participation and provocation. The Performer will play directly to the audience, bending and at times, breaking the age-old illusory fourth wall of traditional theatre. There will be no pretense made of an identity existing between that of the actor and the role. It will be, as in Brechtian Drama, a condition where the Performer remains the Performer, no matter what he or she is enacting. Truth is the most powerful Comedy.

Ultimately the troupe will present an EVENT rather than just a show. Each of these will be unreproducable and highly, unapologetically theatrical. We are not going for cheap and petty (or even just) laughs, but subversive innovation and overt virtuosity.

Back to the Mild Dementia page. Visit the Photo Gallery of Past Performances.