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Gone to the dogs: The world is a dystopia
filled with vicious cannibals in the abstract
play “The Dog, The Night, and The Knife,”
opening at Irondale in Fort Greene on
March 15. Photo by Caroline Ourso
Eat prey, love
Dystopian play shows the gory extremes of bad romance
COURIER LIFE, M 24-7 AR. 15-21, 2019 75
By Kevin Duggan It’s a dog-eat-dog world.
A bizarre new play will use a terrifying
landscape of cannibals and flesheating
canines to examine the selfishness of
human relationships. “The Dog, The Night,
and The Knife,” written by the German
playwright Marius van Mayenburg, and
translated into English by Maja Zade,
will have its United States premiere at the
Irondale in Fort Greene on March 15. It
tells the story of “M,” a woman who finds
herself pursued through a brutal dystopia
where time is stuck in the middle of the
night, according to its director.
“The play is her journey through the
night where she’s being hunted and chased
by blood-thirsty creatures and trying to survive
and trying not to become one of them,”
said Yuri Kordonsky, who also teaches
directing at Yale.
The main character must fight her way
through a world of people infected by what
the playwright calls “the hunger,” who are
driving to hunt and consume their loved
ones, reflecting the selfish nature of reallife
human relationships, said Kordonsky.
“The inhabitants of the world are hungry,
which manifests in the desire to eat
the person you love. It’s about relationships
and how selfish and possessive and consuming
they might be,” he said. “Almost
everything we can love has an element of
possession and consuming, and the pure
act of generous love is an extremely rare
thing in this world.”
M’s journey seems hopeless until she
meets the character “Younger Sister,” and
the two break the rules of the play’s bleak
universe by falling in love in a selfless way,
the director said.
“They discover that relationships can
be something else, giving rather than taking,”
he said.
The play’s nightmarish landscape is also
occupied by ravenous stray dogs, played by
human actors. Rather than make the thespians
crawl on all fours and bark, Kordonsky
and his team bridged the gap between man
and beast more subtly.
“We work on movements that might
be reminiscent of dogs in their movement,
some vocal techniques the actors use that
remind you of howling and barking,”
Kordonsky said.
The play is violent, but the director said
his rendition will not be gory. Instead, the
violence is portrayed in a more abstract
way, which could be even more unsettling
to the audience.
“There’s knives and multiple stabbings
going on, bleeding wounds, we take this
rather metaphorically, nothing that we put on
stage is graphic or gory,” he said. “It’s a story
that unsettles you and should disturb.”
Kordonsky and his partners from the
production company Just Toys were captured
by the play’s visceral power, he said,
even though it was difficult to decipher. The
piece’s abstract nature became an appealing
challenge to the team, he said.
“There was a combination of a sense
of very strong and attractive mystery, the
gut visceral feeling that it’s good, and the
challenge to understand it on an intellectual
level,” he said. “But this is exactly when you
know that you have to do a play. When you
know exactly from the beginning how to do
a play, there’s no point in doing it.”
“The Dog, The Night, and The Knife,”
at Irondale 85 S. Oxford St. at Lafayette
Avenue in Fort Greene, www.irondale.org,
(718) 488–9233. March 15–April 6; Mon,
Wed–Sat at 7:30 pm. $30.
/www.irondale.org
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