Lecture, Performance

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a performance by the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). The company performs an excerpt from their new play, THE GOLDEN VEIL, followed by a discussion about their practice.

Written by company member Normandy Sherwood and created collaboratively by the ensemble, THE GOLDEN VEIL is cautionary entertainment, and a distillation of the NTUSA’s design aesthetic, re-invention, and examination of the history of American entertainment into a 3-person play performed on an entirely hand-crafted, collapsible set. The play is an exploration of picaresque narrative in the tradition of Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Equally, it is an exploration of how the stories and myths we share as Americans are shaped by the teller and the circumstances of their telling.

Recently awarded the 2007 Spalding Gray Award honoring innovative theatrical vision, the NTUSA is an ensemble theater company that democratically creates new works for traditional and non-traditional spaces. In the past seven years, their focus on theatrical environment has been matched by a devotion to the exploration of American history and the history of American entertainment. The NTUSA’s theatrical creations are intensely visual and densely layered spectacles which are laced with the questions and arguments they bring to the exploration of each subject. This multiplicity of image and argument invites a complicit audience to engage with each piece as an active participant.