[REDACTED]

All Department Festival, Department of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU

November, 2019

When the tape is ripped off, what is exposed? 

[REDACTED] is a devised theatre project built with five individual performance Components, each created, choreographed, and directed by a Studio Faculty member of Tisch Drama. Every Component deconstructs, subverts, or interprets the narrative of En Folkefiende, the partner production in the All Department Festival. [REDACTED] plunges into a world of silence and secrets and shatters it inside out.

The origin of the title, “REDACTED”

The original adaptation of Brad Birch’s En Folkefiende actually used “redaction” as a convention in the play. Birch writes in his opening notes of that version, “When [REDACTED] appears in the text, a sound or a drone should cover up the voice of the actor. There should be no leakage.”

There is something in that original “covering up” and repeated covering up that continues to feel highly relevant to the world of the play, even when that explicit convention has been taken out, thus REDACTED.

Our exquisite task is not necessarily to explain the play or to retell the same stories the play is already doing, but to shed light in hidden corners, enter spaces glossed over in the play, uncover secrets, expose that which has been covered. 

REDACTED > EXPOSED.

Title: “Complicit”

Director: Joanne Edelmann

Company Members: ALL

Driving Question: Why are you still not afraid of me?

Anchoring Concept/Theme: 

The Human Zoo poem – the truth appears “out of the fog” of humanity and those that stand for the truth will be revealed

The complication – We all have the capacity to redact; to break free; to be redacted; to stand up; to stand alone

Title: “Minor Chord”

Director: Lorca Peress

Company Members: ALL

Driving Questions: What is the experience of being OTHERED & ISOLATED?

Anchoring Concept/Theme: 

Zoom-In & Zoom-Out

The personal; The anthropological; The political; The social

Title: “Folks”

Director: Sam Gonzalez

Company Members: ALL

Driving Question: Who are “the people” that the En Folkefiende characters keep talking about (but we never see)?

Anchoring Concept/Theme:  

Day in the Life of these very real people

Title: “Insidious”

Director: Andy Arden-Reese

Company Members: ALL

Driving Question: What are you covering up? Why are covering it up? And at what cost?

Anchoring Concept/Theme:  

The more complete the cover, the more the underbelly poisons its host

The Ensemble’s personal underbellies create empathetic bridges with En Folkefiende characters

Title: “Liminal”

Director: Max Reuben

Driving Question: Whether it IS the end of the world or it just feels like it, what do you do - Do you face the truth or to keep up the lie? What if you really can’t fix it?

Anchoring Concept/Theme: 

Moments, Memories, Maybes

Sound Painting (choral style improvisation)