The Kitchen Presents THE GOLDEN VEIL, Now thru 6/16

From tonight, May 31 through June 16, 2012, The Kitchen presents the National Theater of the United States of America's The Golden Veil. The Golden Veil is written and directed by the NTUSA's Normandy Sherwood and James Stanley, respectively.

Performances will take place Thursday to Saturday, May 31 – June 2; Wednesday to Friday, June 6 – 8; and Thursday to Saturday, June 14 – 16 at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). All performances begin at 8:00 P.M. Tickets are $20.

Critics are welcome as of Saturday, June 2, with the official opening on Monday, June 4.

Conjuring the intimacy of a séance and the wild abandon of a hootenanny, The Golden Veil is equal parts pastoral ballet, backwoods jamboree, Punch-and-Judy show and forlorn testimony, an exposé of the lives of the rural poor and a celebration of their lovely handicrafts. In the inimitable style of the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA), The Golden Veil is a violent and lusty revenge fantasy, unfolding via the traditional domestic arts of reading aloud, singing along, making faces, charades and parlor tricks.

Through the telling and retelling of the story, the play explores the ways that we use narrative to render the painful picturesque while it prods the perverse underbelly of our nostalgia for "simpler times." Like much of the NTUSA's work, The Golden Veil is a concatenation of the past. It uses multiple narrators and multiple modes of narrative play to tell the same simple story, revealing through its inconsistencies a nonetheless consistent other and otherly world.

The Golden Veil is performed by Jesse Hawley, Matt Kalman, Ean Sheehy and Maggie Robinson.  The creative team includes Sherwood (writer and designer), Stanley (director and designer), Hawley (composer and designer), Ben Kato (lighting designer) Cooper Gardner (sound design), Jody Elff (sonic manipulations) and Nick Demopoulos (music director)

The National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) is an award winning Brooklyn-based theater company. A collective of writers, visual artists, directors, technicians, performers and craftspeople, the company works democratically to design and construct complex theatrical environments in traditional and non-traditional spaces and to create performances to inhabit them. Their works are intensely visual, densely layered spectacles, which are laced with the questions and arguments they bring to the exploration of each subject they attend. For substance and inspiration, NTUSA dips deep into the wells of American history and the history of American entertainment. Mashing the past into the present, they forge new theatrical forms, while distilling from our heritage new insight into our immediate culture and consciousness.

Founded 10 years ago, the NTUSA has staged groundbreaking re-imaginings of vaudevillian theatricals (Garvey & Superpant$), casino floor shows (Placebo Sunrise), game shows and amusement park rides (What's That On My HEAD!?!), tent revival meetings (ABSN: RJAB) and, most recently, the Circuit Chautauquas – a popular education movement of the late 19th century (Chautauqua!). Combining low tech aesthetics with high tech sorcery, they create intimate experiences that are at once immersive and giddily alienating, and embrace spectacle as a communicative tool.

The NTUSA has received popular and critical acclaim for its innovative approach to form and process and has won awards for design (OBIE, 2006), innovation (Spalding Gray Award 2007) and cultural achievement (LMCC President's Award, 2009). The company has a devoted "downtown" following and a growing national and international audience. Led by co-artistic directors James Stanley, Jesse Hawley, Normandy Sherwood and Yehuda Duenyas, NTUSA company members include JoNathan Jacobs, Ryan Bronz, Ben Kato, Jody Elff, Matt Kalman, Ean Sheehy, Ilan Bachrach, Jamie Peterson and more.
Funding Credits

The Golden Veil was developed with support from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pratt Institute, Lauren Versel and Robert Bresnan, chashama, the Uncanny Valley and generous individual contributors.

This program is made possible with support from the Jerome Foundation and The Greenwall Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.