and those black braids

Tal Beery, and those black braids (2018). Performance. LABA Live, March 22, 2018, 14th Street Y, New York City.

A performance directed by artist Tal Beery responding to the only remaining item left of his estranged grandmother: her dubious 1949 account of surviving the Holocaust. Beery’s impossible search for her real story tangles with a painful past that, like it or not, is gone forever.

Synopsis:
Scripts in hand, two actors and a director perform a play in a fully-lit black box theater in front of an audience. The director periodically stops the actors to give notes. Audience members themselves are following the performance with scripts in hand, and are encouraged to raise their hands and momentarily stop the scene and offer notes or questions. Some actors planted in the audience help break the ice and offer increasingly critical notes that slowly undermine the director and kill the momentum of the performance, shedding light on the challenges of using theater to represent family histories.