LUCINE! OR BIRDSHIT: A HUMAN CONCERTO WITH STRING & VOID Makes Joe's Pub Debut In April

On Tuesday, April 29 at 7PM, Joe's Pub at The Public Theater will present LUCINE! or birdshit: a human concerto with string & void, an experimental new work by Christian De Gré Cárdenas, a theatrical provocateur whose hybrid operettas and human concertos challenge convention and sanity in equal measure.

Directed by Gama Valle and performed by Bethany Geraghty with cellist Eric Eaton, the piece unfolds as a dark comedic concerto for voice and cello—part theatrical aria, part emotional autopsy.

LUCINE! was awarded Best Play with Music at the 2024 New York City Fringe Festival where it was workshopped in April 2024.

The story moves through memory, regret, satire, and surrender as Lucine transforms into the people who shaped—and shattered—her: her undying mother Luna, her infuriatingly supportive husband Elio, her tender lover Rahuil, her sharp-edged daughter Solana, her overworked attendant Tuba, and the ghost of a Confederate grandmother she never met. Each movement echoes a lunar phase, building a rhythm of renewal and disintegration. The cello—Lucine's only companion on stage—becomes a proxy for the emotions she cannot voice. All of it unfolds two years and two days before the apocalypse—a countdown as personal as it is planetary.

“This piece is built like a concerto unraveling mid-performance,” notes De Gré Cárdenas. “It's messy. It's funny. It's cruel. It's full of memory, lies, and the ghosts we inherit. At its heart, it's a fever dream about identity and legacy—a love letter to the idea that we are not one person, but many—and all of them want to be heard before the lights go out.”

Developed as the latest installment in Christian De Gré Cárdenas's 7 Deadly Sins Cycle, LUCINE! explores the seductive ache of greed—not for money, but for meaning, legacy, and love beyond what one is owed. Part dark comedy, part sonic ritual, the piece asks us to sit inside contradiction: mother and monster, lover and liar, victim and culprit. It becomes an emotional autopsy of inherited trauma—passed down like heirlooms from mother to daughter, lover to spouse. With sharp humor and brutal honesty, it reveals how families blur the line between self and other, love and obligation, autonomy and control. In domestic, racial, and romantic power struggles, LUCINE! demands to know: who gets to make decisions, who gets heard, and who gets used? Moving with lunar logic, it reimagines the concerto as a theatrical score—an orchestral experience where the orchestra never arrives, and only a cello remains to carry the weight of everything unsaid.

PERFORMANCE AND TICKET INFORMATION

LUCINE! or birdshit: a human concerto with string & void will take place on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater.

Tickets are $48 and are available for purchase https://publictheater.org/productions/joes-pub/2025/l/lucine/.