Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver
Directed by Steve Kaliski
Presented by Adjusted Realists @ Teatro Circulo
New York, NY • July 2014
One of the major challenges with this production was reviving a show that was incredibly subversive when it first ran in 1993, and translating it for an audience a generation removed from the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s. How do you maintain the emotional charge of such radical declarations as "You can live a long time. You can live forever with this disease." in the era of PreP and PeP?
It was important to me that the sound design be firmly grounded in the time period, but we took opportunities during several of the monologues and more intimate moments in the show to create a "place outside of time". Using modern instruments and effects combined with tribal sounds from different eras throughout history, we sought to create a space adjacent to the text for the audience to experience the rawness and universality of the experience of loss, longing, acceptance, grief, and anger.
—Adam Salberg, Sound Designer
The point is, I forgot my favorite part. The ten plagues...And my favorite, the slaying of the first born. It's my favorite because I am a "first born". Todd - Act 1, Scene 1
I WILL NOT DIE! I WILL NOT! I WILL BE HERE FOREVER!...I WILL OUTLIVE THE TREES AND THE STARS AND THE SEAS AND THE PLANET! Todd - Act 1, Scene 1
(There is a gunshot. Todd steps out of the scene, into a pool of light.)
And then it got very, very cold. Todd - Act 2, Scene 1
And for a moment, for a moment or two that lasts forever, we become one person. And I forget, we forget, that we were ever alive. And everything makes perfect sense. Emma - Act 2, Scene 2
Two hundred and twenty million years ago the dinosaurs came to be. And they were large. In comparison to man they were. And they lived not in harmony, roaming the Earth at will, raping as it were, the planet. But they cared for their young and they flourished as no creature before or since, for one hundred and fifty million years before dying out completely. And no one knows why. Why they lived. Or ceased to. Some people think there was a meteor. Perhaps volcanic ash altered the atmostphere. Some think they overpopulated and the shells of their eggs became too thin. Or they just ran their course, and their end was the order of things. And no tragedy. Or disease. Or God. (He looks at Grace. He covers her face with the afghan. She is dead.) It's so dark. Todd - Act 2, Scene 2
© Copyright , Adam Salberg. All rights reserved.