Mabou Mines Presents Carl Hancock Rux's VS., A New Virtual Performance

Mabou Mines Co-Artistic Director Carl Hancock Rux's experimental multidisciplinary performance Vs. is, variously, a virtual game of tag, an exploration of Zoom theatre, and a philosophical tribunal created to acquit or prosecute crimes against humanity.

Directed by Mallory Catlett, another of Mabou Mines' Co-Artistic Directors, the work premieres online July 30 - August 8, 2021, continuing the company's commitment to experimentation with form and the creation of theatre that interrogates and innovates.

Vs. is the first part of a staged courtroom drama that explores the United States' early 21st century promise and upheaval by putting its ideals on trial using its own institutions. In Rux and Catlett's production, these entities are embodied by "the senate," a stand-in for all institutions based on systems of oppression. Vs. asks whether an institution can be guilty of crimes, and speaks to the need to hold space for real, cathartic accountability in this transformative era. The work taps into the existential conversations of the moment-about isolation, life, liability, and death-using the American judicial system as a framework.

In Vs., the audience experiences the opening questions of an interrogator/institutional functionary to a cadre of witnesses (played by Becca Blackwell, David Thomson, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and Perry Jung)-questions intended to simply establish some agreed upon facts between them. This proves to be more difficult than the interrogator expects. As it evolves, Vs. indulges in a virtual game of 'tag' in which members of the audience are engaged in a psychodynamic investigation of a sovereign polity.

Says Rux, "The last four years of American--and for that matter, global-politics has revealed repetitive yet unprecedented abject horror as it relates to historical oppression and colonialism. Vs. attempts to engage the audience in a tribunal of sociopolitical rifts; a discourse that may or may not attempt to lay blame on a nation state and that ultimately reveals the nation state to be 'us,' or, rather, 'we the people.' The questions it attempts to address are complicated and yet quite simple: What is the history of oppression? Who are the oppressed? What is the final and definitive language of freedom, justice, and liberty for all? What are our tools for human survival? Vs. is heavily influenced by philosophical thinkers including Hélène Cixous, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and even the common man whose questions have repeatedly gone unanswered in the history of the contemporary world."

Tickets are available now for a $10 suggested donation at https://www.maboumines.org/.