This Week's Brooklyn Calendar of Events

When Mexican lesbian nun and playwright Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz was deprived of writing materials as penance, she used her own blood. The Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL)’s latest experimental opera has a similar desperate, outsider-art flavor. Made for less than $1K, PPL has been rehearsing for nearly half a year, digging through trash cans, and renovating the coffin factory space they call home in a fever to perform the apocryphal dreams of Helene Weigel and discover what Feminism really is. In July, a full-blown opera emerges like a hormone-fed, Brooklyn-born, slightly grotesque moth, shaking the shame of poverty from its wingtips, belting tones both avant-garde and avant-pop. O what will women not do for love and art?

90 minutes. Book by composer/sound artist/indie musician Brian McCorkle of the Megatoids (bandmate Tom Swirly is also part of the cast), Parasite Singles, and What Color is Your Machine Gun?) and director/librettist/visual artist Esther Neff, co-artistic directors of the Panoply Performance Laboratory.

SYNOPSIS: The Last Dreams of Helene Weigel or How to Get Rid of The Feminism Once and For All is an experimental, documentary opera following Helene Weigel, Bertolt Brecht's wife and 'the greatest actress who ever lived' as she snaps the neck of a wild swan, escapes robbery by door-to-door linoleum salesmen, and makes covert visits in her dreams to the nunnery cell of Heloise d'Argenteuil, the 12th Century philosopher best known in light of her lover Abelard's castration. Helene is also haunted by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the self-proclaimed 'worst woman in the world' (also played by Andrea Suarez). Using these women as detailed examples of female constructions of self, PPL asks; is it true that women conceive themselves as a pattern of interconnections? Is 'construction of self' a concept constructed by a male-centric philosophy of being? How have women felt about being women? Is one woman representative of every woman?

Produced by the Panoply Performance Laboratory.

Libretto/Direction: Esther Neff
Composition/Music Direction: Brian McCorkle
Assistant Director: Alex Bisker
Costume Designer: Lena Sands
Set Designer: Liz Jenatopolus
Projections/Video: Esther Neff, Alex Bisker, and Brian McCorkle

Performed by:
Helene Weigel/Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz: Andrea Suarez
Bertolt Brecht: Tom Swirly
Heloise: Katie Johnston
Abelard: Matthew Stephen Smith
Actor/Linoleum Salesman: Matthew Gonzalez
Actress/Judith Butler: Kate Garfield
Actress/Simone de Beauvoir: Jessica Bathurst
Actress/Betty Freidan/Vasalisa the Wise: Loren Barnese

The Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) is a performance co-operative formed by director/librettist/designer Esther Neff and co-directed by composer/sound artist/musician Brian McCorkle. Since 2004, PPL has been experimenting with ways of combining documentary-based performance art and theater. PPL pieces begin with the gathering of interviews and are built to show how closely the emotional and expressive currents that inform individuals on a subconscious level and the formal systems of politics, social sciences, and philosophy work together. Sound objects, live music, installation, video, sculpture, and large-scale paintings comprise our efforts to find a way of explaining complex ideas through a medium that can speak directly to impulse and emotion. Our projects often exist on small budgets and are largely created through the in-kind donation of materials found in the possession of the participants and spaces donated in cities nationwide.

PPL has held residencies through LMCC, chashama, and performed at Dixon Place, the Brecht Forum, University Settlement, The West End Theater, The Richmond Shepard Theater, The Manhattan Theatre Source, Gathering of the Tribes Gallery, The Public Theater, LPAC, and many more venues in addition to the Theresienwiese in Munich, Germany, Prospect Park, and a bank vault across from the NY Stock Exchange. In addition to the creation of work, PPL holds workshops, runs a performance space, and curates the PERFORMANCY FORUM in Bushwick, Brooklyn at Surreal Estate.